


Living to Die

by Cards_Slash



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Abstergo Industries, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Betrayal, Dark!Malik, Dubious Consent, Imprisonment, M/M, Murder, Prison, Soul Mate murder, Templars are Bad People, soul mates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-14 17:33:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 61,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2200737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soul mates (and immortality) were as stupid an idea as a machine that could access memories stored in your DNA.  Desmond ran away from his home to get the hell away from crazy ideas but that was before he was kidnapped by Abstergo, locked in a room, used as a one man historical re-enactment and then abruptly transferred to 'the Vault'.  </p><p>Vidic's dead but Lucy is still alive to make sure Desmond makes friends with the so-called 'King of Swords', the last known living soul mate.  <i>The</i> man that found a way to kill every other soul mate.  The only trouble is the more Desmond knows, the less likely he is to make it out alive.  Funny how only the megalomaniac mass murderer seems to understand that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> based off a post on tumblr that said something like 'only your soul mate can kill you'. I just thought to myself, why not write some Altmal with that idea. Right?

The (so-called) briefing room was a sparsely lit ten-by-ten square of space with a single rickety wooden table sagging in the center. There were only two metal folding chairs and one old bar stool with a dry and cracking leather cushion on the top. This far into the building there were no windows and only a poor aging ventilation system that circulated sweat-warm air into the room. The smell of watery old mold filled the small space overlapping neatly to the diluted smell of a day-old perfume and apple scented shampoo. Lucy dropped the last of a stack of boxes that bent-back old men had spent the past hour or two bringing in.

Impossibly, she had a pinked-look of irritation as if he should feel sorry for her. Desmond sneered at the hassled catch of her breath and the way she slapped the door shut with one outstretched hand. 

“Bad day?” Desmond said. His fingertips had gone numb from being cuffed behind his back since before dawn that morning when Vidic had shown up at the much nicer facility they had been keeping him and demanded he be moved to The Vault (with implied capitals of unusually firm purpose). The ride over had involved a syringe of something clear and instantly overwhelming jabbed into his arm before he woke up with a black sack over his head and fresh bands of pain where they must have hauled him around like a sack of something unpleasant smelling. Awareness came back to him in a box barely seven foot long and four foot wide that they referred to as his ‘cell’. There was a bucket as a bathroom and a swinging plate at the bottom of the door they had pushed a stale sandwich and a bottle of water through. It must have been a joke since they never bothered to release him from the cuffs.

Now he was here, down a maze of tunnel-like hallways and left chained to a metal bar attached to the far wall. The man that left him there said it was the ‘briefing room’ only after Desmond asked.

Lucy’s smile was indulgent but it wasn’t kind. Her body shifted to the right and she put one hand on her hip. “Yes. You’ll perhaps be pleased to know that your assassin brothers mounted an attempt to rescue you. That was a fun shoot out. Vidic is dead, if that matters to you.” Then she flipped the top of the box and looked down at the papery guts inside. “Of course that means until you’re assigned a new overseer, you are stuck here. So I brought you something to read.”

“It’s hard to read tied to a bar across the room,” Desmond said.

“I thought you were an assassin. Didn’t they teach you how to escape handcuffs?” Lucy retorted. She reached into the box and pulled out a single file and dropped it on the table. “This is the summation of the information found in the rest of the box. You have tonight to read through this and whatever else you can make it through.” She pulled a key out of her pocket and dropped it on top of the file. “Good luck.”

Desmond was grinding-his-teeth as she turned with a flirty twist and left the room. The echoing sound of the door slapping against the frame covered the retreating sound of her footsteps. When he was sure that she was far enough away that she couldn’t hear, he whispered, “ _bitch_.” The table was too far away for him to get to with his upper body so he grabbed the bar behind his back with both fists and lifted himself away from the floor. There was a shiver of disuse in his arms and his belly. Assassin training had been an abstract notion of his childhood, trapped away in the back of his head with the smell of dusty chicken coops and the early-morning-dew on grass. Once upon a time, Desmond had been able to climb the sheer face of a wall without breaking a sweat but that was years-ago-now. He managed to get his foot hooked around a table leg and dragged the table close enough he could get the keys with his teeth.

It took two tries and one rather painful act of contortionism before he got the keys to his numb fingers and unlocked the cuff. The sudden freedom of motion brought a second wave of pain to his shoulders and arms that was nearly staggering. Blackness swirled around his head like racing rabbits and he fell into the table before he could catch his balance. His hands were wooden and uncooperative when he tried to catch himself. He sat with his back against the wall and looked at his reddened hands.

“Shit,” he said to himself as the pulse of blood returning to his fingertips.

\--

Contrary to the look of it, the door was sturdy _and locked_. Desmond had given a few runs at it and managed to do nothing but rattle it in the frame. He spent about an hour sitting with his back against the door and another few wasted minutes kicking it and pounding his fists against it. There was no camera (that he could see) in the room so he was spared that little indignity. 

When exhaustion left him with no better ideas, Desmond sat in one of the metal chairs and pulled the single folder over to look at it. It seemed like the best chance at survival seemed to hinge upon playing along. The words on the paper were blurry from age—looked as if they had been written on a first generation type writer. There were blots of ink here and there obscuring some of the letters. The edges were yellowed from repeated handling, creased where they folded in and thinned with age. 

“Reading,” Desmond said to himself, “they kidnapped me, held me prisoner for a few months and stuck me in a torture machine to relive some dead guy’s memories so I could take up some light reading. Good job, Abstergo. Good job, Desmond.” 

It took one-two- blinks before the words on the page came into soft focus. He rested his cheek against his fist and mouthed the words to himself, listening and seeing them without having enough energy or interest to focus. It wasn’t until the words ‘soul mates’ and ‘ritualistic murders’ were used in the same sentence that he managed to pay attention.

“What the hell?”

\--

There was a myth (just a myth, not fact, not legend, not even a vague whiff of truth about it at all) about soul mates. It floated around high school mythology classes and spilled out into popular culture where it was repeated word-of-mouth. Desmond had heard it from a man with one too many drinks floating behind his eyeballs (some sad little bastard that looked barely legal) who told it like this:

In the beginning, people were born with four legs and four arms and two heads. They were perfect and _powerful_. They were far more powerful than the humans of today that ran around like idiots looking for love-and-a sense-of-completion. No, _these_ humans were strong _and_ fearless. 

The God(s) were _terrified_ of the power of these beings, afraid of the threat they represented. (The God(s) were _afraid_ of course of being _Forgotten_ and rendered _useless_. What use did man have for God(s) when they had a sense of utter completion within themselves?)

People were split, tore straight down the middle, scattered all across the world and sent on a fruitless mission to find-and-reunite with their other half. Oh-and-how that slobbering drunk little man had gone on about how much he wanted the contentment and the certainty that came with a love-like-that and he meant like-a-lover. Romance-and-floating hearts and the _myth_ of a love so perfect it terrified the God(s) was like a balm on that little man’s aching heart.

It should have stayed just like that; just a story drunk men in well-lit bars sobbed out to bartenders. 

\--

Lucy came back in the morning with a bucket of gruel and a tall thermos of water. She dropped them on the table where Desmond had fallen asleep and wrinkled her nose at the stench of the bathroom-bucket they’d left him with. 

“Wake up, Desmond. We don’t have very much time now.”

But Desmond was tired like being beaten and starving and uncomfortable. Words were circling around his head with a sizable helping of pictures of murder scenes that ranged from crudely rendered sketches to grainy black and white photographs. The last in a long-long-line of pictures was a full color photograph of a grisly murder. The knobby end of some sorry son-of-a-bitch’s femur sticking out of a woman’s eye socket. 

“Time for what?” Desmond said. He rubbed at his eyes and frowned at the gray slop in the bucket and the ladle-like spoon he was given to eat it with. Beggars-and-prisoners couldn’t afford to be choosy so he sucked it down with little reservation. 

Lucy was looking at the spread of things on the table. She was sneering at the pictures and shaking her head at his poor handling of the nearly ancient papers. The so-called ‘abstract’ of the whole ridiculous collection was half on the table and half on the floor. “You don’t believe any of this, do you?”

“Should I? I mean, Abstergo is chasing down mystical golden balls and playing games with genealogy so why not throw in some crackpot theories about soul mates and immortality? Doesn’t really seem that crazy for you. Do you wear tin hats at your company meetings?” The gruel slid down his throat cold-and-slimy but it settled in his stomach like a lead weight. 

Lucy was nothing, absolutely _nothing_ in the whole world, if not _shrewd_. If there was a simpler, easier, more direct route to the ultimate conclusion then she was sure to know and exploit it. So when she cleared her throat and straightened her back, that sense of dread in the pit of Desmond’s stomach jumped up into his throat like a heated-sort-of-worry. Her fingers slipped just beyond reach of the papers she had been putting into order as she said, “I’ll show you then. There’s no point in giving you this opportunity to understand what you’re going up against if you don’t believe it could be true.”

“You’re going to show me a soul mate?” he said. Motioned at the papers all around them. “You’re going to show me someone that’s been alive since ‘the beginning’?”

“I’m going to show you the vilest being to ever grace the surface of this planet.” Then she turned toward the door and motioned him after her. Her footsteps were quick-quick and his were sloppy-and-slow as he raced out into the black hallways after her. A single light flickered at the cross-section of each hallway, blinking in-and-out in odd rhythms. There were no markings on the wall that Desmond could make out but his hand bumped now and again against a raised door frame and he thought he could hear the faint scratching of something still living in this awful place. “Do you remember anything from the reading?”

They were going down, the sudden steep slant akin to a playground slide as Desmond fought to keep himself upright. There was no light to warn him before he ran into a solid-metal door, the resounding thunk of his body did nothing to cover the cheerful little chuckle Lucy made at his misfortune. “Soul mates can only be killed by their soul mate. Most of them are dead now. Abstergo is pretty sure they caught one they call the King of Swords. Something about a soul mate serial killer. It’s pretty blurry.”

Lucy knocked against the door and something mechanical and heavy knocked back. The door split open in the middle with jagged looking teeth parting only far enough for them to slip through sideways. There was light on the other side, a blinding white light that filled four hallways built like a moat around a single room. “Ready?” she said.

“For what?” Desmond asked. 

The door opened when Lucy pressed a button. It slid out in both directions and Lucy’s hand on his arm shoved him forward into a room light as brightly as the moat of hallways surrounding it. The inside was a barrage of colors and _things_ too many to take in at once. Desmond was going to ask what the hell she meant to do with him when a quick-step of motion in the distance made him turn his head just in time to see the man Lucy shot twice in the head. The ricocheting noise of the shots made his ears ring in pain. The body hit the ground with a wet-kind of noise and Lucy turned to look at him.

“He probably won’t take it out on _you_ , but he’ll be pissed when he wakes up.” Then she was stepping backward out of the doors and Desmond was locked in a room with a dead body bleeding-bright-red over layers-and-layers of carpets. 

\--

‘The King of Swords’, the papers had called him. A man that had been alive for as long as history could be recorded. He had appeared here-and-there in a hundred different civilizations. He had stolen a thousand kingdoms. He had emancipated and enslaved an innumerable number of people. The most fearsome of assassins, the most feared of nightmares. 

\--

Desmond paced, one end of the room to the other. His hands were laced at the back of his head and his breath came in short little bursts when he couldn’t contain the need for oxygen another moment. But the smell of blood-and-death was so heavy in the air that it turned his stomach and there was nowhere-nowhere in this god-awful little square hell hole to retch his guts out. So he paced and he held his breath.

He looked-at-didn’t-really-see the maps drawn on the walls. Over and over, cities and countries and the whole of the world. He saw-and-didn’t-really understand the scrawl of so many languages in cramped little corners around the edges of the maps. The walls were black-and-gray with the marks, the ceiling was covered in letters and words and tiny-little-pictures that were blurry through the panic in Desmond’s chest. 

There was a table. There were chairs. There was a stack of cushions made out like a bed in the far corner. 

“Fuck,” Desmond said when he came to a dead stop not-even-six feet away from the dead body. The man was slumped over face-down. His hair was black with red blood, long enough to fall in untidy knots here and there. His skin was paled from blood loss all down his bare back and arms. There was a lifeless, puppet-like sprawl to his legs that did little to hide the strength that must have been contained in them in life. Desmond was working up to a full-out panic attack just before the body twitched. The scream that shattered out of Desmond’s chest was all-shock but the groan that rattled wetly out of the recently-dead body was fully-conscious.

The body moved stiffly but surely, straightening up before the (dead) man tipped his head back and then forward. His hand went to his face hidden behind the mess of dark hair that fell forward. There were wet-meaty sounds as his fingers dug at something on his face before a brief splatter of blood landed on the carpet in a halo of dark little circles. When the man looked up at him there was one hole in the center of his forehead but two slugs in his hand. 

Desmond stumbled backward as the man got to his feet. “You can’t be real.”

The man was shorter-not-taller than him but the grim drip of blood crawling out of the wound in his head gave him the ghastly advantage. His eyes had gone blood-red where the whites should have been like the sallow-dead tinge of his skin. But his body moved, his muscles fluidly shifting as he stepped toward Desmond with all the swift-and-deadly certainty of a murderer. 

Desmond was expecting anything (quick-and-painless death, perhaps) but the man’s bloody hand grabbing him by the chin. Anything in the world but the almost-fond way the man’s thumb went down over the scar on his lip and the half-hearted-grin that crossed his face. 

“Sit,” the man said. He motioned at the table.

Desmond sat.

The man dropped the slugs on the table and sat in the seat opposite from him at the table. His hands folded one-over-the-other in front of him. He was still (almost unrealistically so) as Desmond fidgeted. The hole in his head showed red-and-pink and the white edge of bone that was knitting itself back together. “Great care was taken in keeping your bloodline clean, boy. Many sacrifices were made, many lives were taken. Hardships were many and frequent in the lives of your ancestors. Not a single child was born by accident for nearly nine hundred years. Understand that you were _bred_ the way one breeds a superior horse.”

Desmond could only sit in horror, watching as the bone covered the gap in the man’s forehead and the pink-slush of flesh grew in after it. He was rapt, listening but not hearing, as the man’s skin pinked and darkened with a fresh flow of blood and the bloodshot redness of his eyes cleaned out to white again. 

“You have not come to sit across this table from me by accident,” the man said, “either you are a decoy meant to provide these petty little fools with some distraction or you are a spy sent to gather information. By the lax expression on your face, I’d wager you have _no idea_ why you are here.” The man leaned forward enough to snap his fingers in front of Desmond’s face. “Answer,” the man said.

“Lucy shot you,” Desmond said.

The man nodded patiently.

“She _shot_ you.” He looked at the man’s chest, at the livid scar just above where his heart was. It was a twisted-red slash over a darker mark. It looked to be half of a bird with its wing spread nearly the width of the man’s chest. Thick dark hair covered the details of the mark the outline was easy enough to define. “It’s true.”

“Yes,” the man said simply. “Tell me why you are here.”

“Lucy wants me to read these boxes. Vidic told her to bring me here—and he’s dead. The assassins attacked them and Lucy said he’s dead. They took me from my house—who are you? _What_ are you?”

The man’s smile had nothing-nothing-at-all to do with the free falling babble tumbling out of Desmond’s mouth. He relaxed in place. Said, “I am Malik Al-Sayf. It is not my first name but it is the one I was wearing when _he_ found me for the first time. I am not sentimental by nature but I cannot part with the name regardless.” A pause, the pink drag of his hand across his lips before he said, “there were many names for me. I have been called a king, a conqueror, once a mentor, once a grandmaster, once a slave master. I have been a pillager, a mercenary, a pirate, a war monger, an assassin and the very first Templar. I have been revered as a god. I have been burned as a witch. I know only that I can’t die no matter how hard you mortals try.”

There wasn’t room in Desmond’s hands for questions, no space at all to process information big-or-small save for the confident pose of the man in front of him and the damning evidence of the two bullet slugs sitting on the table between them.

“Come tomorrow, Desmond,” Malik said. “I think I’ll amuse myself with you.”

Desmond meant-to-ask something just there but the doors were sliding open and Lucy was on the other side with her gun pointed at Malik’s back. A flicker of muscle in his shoulder was the only indication he gave that he was aware of her presence at all. 

“Bring me some dates, Desmond. I’m hungry.”

Lucy caught him by the shirt and pulled him out of the room before Desmond could agree-or-disagree to the request. The door slammed shut to the sound of a chair scraping against the floor. There was the barest flash of Malik through the closing doors and Lucy’s quick-quick breath and the pink flush of fear on her cheeks. When she looked at Desmond she was not the shrewd woman of yesterday but something _human_ , something _equal_ (at last). She said, “do you believe now, Desmond?”


	2. Chapter 2

Desmond was returned to his cell. He sat on the mat they called a bed and watched the little black bugs eat the food that had been left there overnight. They were in-and-out of the stale bread, crawling over the plate and retreating again to the cracks in the wall and the tall corners of the room. 

\--

Sleep came like a hammer, falling on him without pity. 

\--

“Wake up Desmond,” Lucy said. She stood in a puddle of light just outside of his door looking down at him with the most pitying expression on her face. There was a tall canteen tucked under her arm and a bag full of dates hanging from her left fist. “You get two hours in the briefing room before you’ll be taking these to your new friend.” She shook the bag and then motioned him up-and-out.

“You’re sending me back?” Desmond said. It was those words that filled his chest with air and his muscles with a spasm of energy. He was rushing out after her so quickly he nearly ran her over when she stopped suddenly. 

“Of course,” Lucy said. “If you’d done any of the reading, you’d know why. This place?” she motioned all around them, “it serves only one purpose. To keep _him_ in and the other _out_. It was a gamble with you,” Lucy said as she started walking. “There was a fifty percent chance that he would snap your neck as soon as he saw your face. Vidic was sure that he would. He said I was too sentimental and a murderer like _him_ wouldn’t care.”

“Fifty percent?” Desmond repeated.

“Honestly,” Lucy said. She turned in a puddle of light at the cross section of the black hallways, “being killed might have been a better fate than the one you have now. Nobody knows you’re here. Nobody would know how to find you even if they did.”

“And I’m just supposed to do what you tell me?” 

Lucy shifted on her feet again, got that impatient-glare in her eyes. “Yes, Desmond. Up to this point you’ve been treated relatively well. But this is the truth of the situation: you have been kidnapped. You are our prisoner and you will do what we say without fighting or force will be applied.”

“Fine,” Desmond hissed.

\--

The briefing room’s bucket-toilet had been swapped for another one. Desmond sat in the creaking metal chair with a scowl of victory. (Whatever victory you could take away from knowing some poor Abstergo stooge had the job of cleaning shit buckets.) The bag of dates were set gingerly in one corner of the table and the papers he’d scattered the day before were stacked neatly back into place. Those pictures he’d taken out were hanging on the wall—in order from the earliest known murder to the last one. 

“Alright,” he said to himself. “Suspend your disbelief, Desmond. Soul mates and immortals are a thing.”

He started with the box labeled ‘portraits’. It opened with a wheeze of dust and a crinkle of plastic. The individual renderings (of Malik, all of them Malik) had been preserved in sheets of plastic and there was a clever little pocket of tape strips for him to fix the portraits to the wall. 

Malik-the-King. Malik-the-Conqueror. Malik-the-Gentleman. Malik-the-Emperor. Malik-the-Great. Malik-the-Scourge. Again and again, the portraits of a ruthless man, hated (and feared) by the artists that had drawn his face. Desmond sat on the table and looked at them, the visual history of the man up to the dawn of color photography when he was caught at the edge of a political protest with a deeply attentive scowl on his face. 

“You are a piece of work,” Desmond said to the pictures. One after another the picture of a monster. One after another drawn by the shaking hand of men who feared for their lives. Men that had sat in the presence of the very devil himself. He heaved a sigh and picked up the abstract again. 

\--

Lucy collected him after his time was finished. She offered him a decent meal—some sort of meat and real bread and a frothy thermos of milk. He shoved the food into his mouth as they walked through the black hallways with the scratching at the walls. Down-and-down the slope into the metal door again. 

The brightness of the moat made spots sprinkle in his vision but Lucy marched on without pause. She motioned at Desmond to stand directly in the center of the doors and cleared her throat. “He’s probably still mad. If he attacks you, don’t fight back.”

“What?” Desmond asked just before the door opened in front of him and Lucy’s hand on his back shoved him forward through them. Malik was sitting on the cushions at the far end of the room with his legs crossed and his hands resting on his thighs. Desmond tripped on the rolled up bloody carpet by the door and nearly landed on his face. He managed to catch himself on his elbow but lost his grip on the thermos of milk. “Ow,” he said as he sat back. His bread was in crumbs against his shirt front and his milk was spilling slowly from the loosened cap but the dates were safe enough.

“Have they told you what information they want from me?” Malik asked. 

Desmond was inspecting the raw rug-burned wound on his elbow and missed the silent motion that brought Malik to stand right in front of him. The man was naked to the waist again, bare foot and towering over him when Desmond was on his knees. “Uh,” he said as he held the dates up. “No. I don’t know what they want. I just found out there was a fifty percent chance that you’d kill me.”

Malik snorted. “That’s a very generous percentage they gave your survival. I’ve killed every other man they’ve put in this room.” He motioned toward the table and even stooped to pick up the milk as Desmond got to his feet. “Was it Lucy that offered you that gracious chance at survival?”

It was two steps to the table, and he hovered there by the chair while Malik stood behind his on the opposite side. He was pressing one of the dates against his lips as his eyes fluttered closed and his nostrils widened to draw in the smell of the fruit. “Yes,” Desmond said. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

Malik’s eyes opened fully again and the vague pulling of a smile at his lips dropped instantly down into a frown. He waved his hand to the side as if he could shove the question out of existence with the motion. “Your father is William Miles?”

“Yes,” Desmond said. “How did you know that? How do you know anything about me?”

“Ask smarter questions, boy.” Malik sat. “Who was your mother?”

“Maria Quinn,” Desmond said. “Did you have a mother?”

There was the derisive little snort again. Malik set the date he had been holding on the table and leaned back against the chair. “Maria Quinn. I suppose she wasn’t the worst choice William could have made. Do you have brothers?”

“No.”

“Ah,” Malik said. Then he said, “I did not have a mother. For me, there was a light like a great bolt of lightning and then indescribable pain. I woke up in water far from the shore without any idea how I had gotten there.” Then, “sisters?”

“No. I’m the only one. Why does it matter?”

“Because I have spent centuries crafting your family line, boy. You should be a prized stallion and you’re a workhorse at best. Durable enough judging by the smell and look of you, but hardly the inspiring specimens of previous generations. Although, I suppose, William was a bit of a disappointment as well.” His head inclined to the side as a breath wheezed out through his nose. The light over their head flickered-and-popped, dimming almost completely at one point before coming back to full brightness again. 

“What does that mean, you’ve crafted my bloodline? Is that why they kidnapped me? No—you know what, don’t answer that.”

Malik was amused, if only a little bit, by the speed of Desmond’s words. Perhaps by the way he threw his hands up at his own ridiculous lack of luck. His chair tipped backwards with the motion and Desmond grabbed the table with the sudden fear of gravity. The front two feet of the chair hit the ground and his arm slapped across the table close enough for Malik to grab his wrist. The grip was tight-and-hard, the blunted ends of Malik’s fingernails sharp and unrelenting. There was no indication on his face that he was even aware that he’d moved at all. His other hand came like a slither across the table, catching the ratty end of Desmond’s long gray shirt and shoving it up to his elbow to show the tattoo that covered the top of his arm. For one moment Malik was looking intently at his face and then he was looking down. The half-amused glint in his eyes turned into a feral-kind of smile.

Desmond tried to pull his arm free but Malik did not give. So he pushed his feet against the floor and used his height like leverage, threw the whole of his weight backward and managed to do nothing but scrape the chair across the floor and pull himself up to his feet. Malik looked up at him as blood seeped out of the shallow crescent cuts his nails left on Desmond’s skin. “My father is an impotent old man jumping at ghosts in a compound. You think he’s going to have another kid now? After the disappointment I’ve been? If you kill me you’re wasting all that effort you put into ‘crafting my family line’.”

The pressure on his arm was released so suddenly Desmond found himself stumbling backward. He knocked into something wooden (the chair) and tipped to the side but did not fall. He came back upright to find Malik standing in front of him just before the dates rolled off the edge of the now crooked table. Desmond swallowed. 

“Your mistake is overestimating your significance. There are bastards of your family line—children that slipped away from me in the early days that had children that had children that have spread across the globe like an unwanted infestation. You are one of many, Desmond. Remember that when you beg for your life.” Then he stepped to the side and turned to straighten the table. 

“Why my family? Why me?” Desmond whispered. 

“Sit,” Malik said.

Desmond sat.

“Tell me everything you remember about your life, from the very first moment you remember until Lucy pushed you into this door this morning.”

It was a ridiculous request and Desmond was going-to-scoff at the notion of playing a game of recollection with a self-confessed murderer but there was nothing-else to do. So he cleared his throat and said, “There was this duck I found when I was a kid…”

\--

It went like that, Desmond’s mouth-and-jaw shaping words of things that poured out of the center of his skull. The sound of his voice rising-and-falling with the passing of years and the torment of reliving the stupidity of ‘the Farm’ and the people in it. He was venting his fury of being trapped inside of a (lie) and forced to ‘fall in line’. There was victorious rage in his voice with the mad dash across the country that tumbled into awe when he found himself in New York.

And dark defeat in the days of his capture.

\--

Malik sat still and unmoving until Desmond’s mouth had gone dry and his memories had dried up. They were on opposite sides of the table with numb legs from sitting so long and the creaking sway of the building over their heads. Malik’s silence seemed as sure a death sentence as his grip on Desmond’s arm had been. 

“Thank you,” Malik said after a pause.

“Yeah, well, I’m chatty when my life depends on it.”

“Warren Vidic wanted something from you when he brought you to Abstergo. In the ‘Animus’, that machine you said allows you to access memories hidden in your DNA, who’s memories did they ask you to retrieve?”

Desmond took a drink of the long-warm-milk. “Ezio Auditore,” he said.

Malik nodded once. “There is information that they are sending you to collect from me. The methods they have used before have proven ineffective. This method is, perhaps, one of their most clever. I will tell you nothing until you figure out what they plan to extract from me. Prove to me that you deserve the emblem you have branded yourself with.” Then he stood up and went back to the cushions he’d been sitting on when Desmond entered the room.

\--

It was not Lucy that came to fetch him but some unknown man with an air of boredom that hung around his body so thickly it was nearly an odor. They walked through the blackened hallways that seemed to lead nowhere at all until suddenly Desmond was at the door of the despicable little cell they were keeping him in. There was a fresh container of food with angry hover of bugs waiting for their chance to get inside of it. And there were fresh clothes sitting on the beaten mattress they’d given him to sleep on.

“Change and push your clothes through the door,” the man said.

Desmond stripped the filthy clothing off and kicked it through the bottom of the door before he’d even taken the time to look at his new apparel. The new clothes were serviceable-not-stylish but they were _clean_. The stiff cotton flowed against his skin like the softest silk and the socks-and-underwear hugged tight to his skin like warm little blankets. He sat on the mattress and gorged on the mashed-up-mix-up of some sort of casserole while his stomach gurgled loudly at the offering.

\--

But it was hours before he slept. Hours of time sitting in his cell with his back slouched against one wall and his feet braced against the other. Hours of time to think-about-the-things he’d heard. To repeat the words Malik had used and the reactions he’d had.

Desmond hadn’t told anyone half of the things about his life that he’d blurted out so readily to Malik. The feeling in his chest wasn’t embarrassment (though God knew he had plenty to be embarrassed about) but the sense of being someone else’s foregone conclusion that angered him. Malik thought he was an idiot and Lucy thought he was a useful tool. Vidic must have thought he was a semi-worthwhile bargaining chip.

Truth was, Desmond was a prisoner with zero chance at escape. His father would have been bellowing abuse at him for the idiocy of the predicament he found himself in. Smart-boys-stay-alive. 

\--

Lucy came again with the flicker of the light over his head. She gave him two boiled eggs and a still-hot sausage to eat before she led him down the halls and into the briefing room. “Obviously we have audio surveillance in Malik’s room.”

I-heard-everything.

“Should I apologize for the number of time I called you all dicks?” Desmond asked.

“Play along with whatever games you want, Desmond. The facts haven’t changed. You are only as valuable as the results you show. When you do well, you are rewarded.” She motioned to the photos on the wall. “What was this? I gave you two hours in here to prepare yourself before you went to see him and you spent it arranging his pictures?”

“I’m a visual person.” That was true-and-wasn’t. Desmond didn’t mind reading but he wasn’t great at it and digging through the tomes of information without having any sense of direction seemed like the least advisable thing to do. Desmond leaned back in the creaking metal chair so he could see Lucy’s tight-and-frustrated scowl. “What results do you want from me?”

Lucy’s body slid along the rough side of the table, her leg lifted ever so slightly as she pushed her hip against it and leaned toward him. Her fingers were soft-and-silky cool against his skin as she whispered (like a purring little kitten), “what we’ve always wanted from you.” Then she was gone again, across the room in the blink of an eye and waving her hand dismissively at the boxes. “I’ll return in two hours. Try to get some actual work done this time.”

\--

Desmond-was-a-dick. He was born with absolutely-zero-survival-instinct (as his father liked to tell him). In fact, good ole William had once told Desmond that if ‘you were any bigger of an idiot you’d walk in front of a God damn train and be surprised when it hit you’. It wasn’t even that Desmond didn’t understand it was life-or-death but that he didn’t deal-well-with ultimatums. 

Was getting to know the man he was going to be shoved into a room with a good idea? There was no doubt it was. Malik was full of himself (that was as good a piece of information as any) and he had a thing for intelligence that seemed a bit obsessive. He was as old as history itself (or older) and God knows what he’d already seen-or-heard-or done. (Someone knew, or thought they did, what with all these boxes.) 

It was just that Lucy insulted him and Desmond turned years of Abstergo’s careful research into paper airplanes that he sent careening into walls and ventilation ducts. There was a pile of wreckage under the wheezing air vent when Lucy came through the door with a red-rage on her cheeks. 

“Insolence is for children, Desmond.”

“And what, kidnapping is for adults? Why don’t you record someone reading all of this nonsense and I’ll listen to it while I sleep?” He put his arms behind his head and grinned at her for the full five seconds it took for her to drag him off his chair and into the halls. “What?” he asked with half-a-laugh caught in his throat. 

Lucy didn’t play along (of course she didn’t) but walk like stomping through the halls that led them to the moat around Malik’s room. She turned at the very last second to shove his body against the wall so that her arm was across his collarbone not at all a safe distance from choking the last breath out of his throat. “This isn’t a game, do you understand that? Malik has killed every man we’ve sent through those doors. He toys with them sometimes, leads them on for a few days so we think we’ve finally made some headway but he _always kills them_. It’s your life you’re risking when you waste time playing games.”

“It’s my life _you’re_ risking,” Desmond said. 

There was no comeback to that statement but the lurching sound of the door opening before Desmond was pushed through it again. Malik was not on the cushions this time but sitting at the table with the dates arranged on a plate in front of him. He was shirtless (still) with little black smudges on the back of his left shoulder in jagged scratch-marks. The smell of ink was strong in the room and there was a new map on the far wall wedged fresh-and-shimmering wet between two smaller maps. 

“They want the Apple,” Desmond said. He dropped into the chair opposite Malik. “I’d tell you what it is but I just get this feeling you know more about it than I do.”

For a moment, it seemed as if Malik had not even heard the words. There was a lightless look in his eyes as if he had simply vacated his body without notice. His chest moved with breath and his pulse jumped in his throat but there was nothing conscious in the stance of his body. When he blinked it seemed to be a momentous effort. “No,” Malik said. “If they put you in a machine to mine your ancestor’s memories they are not looking for something they are already aware was hidden by someone else. I have no use for the trinkets of lost civilizations. It’s curious that they sent you to tell me this lie.”

“Is it?” Desmond repeated, he motioned around the room. “They’ve had you locked in here since the sixties. Lucy seems to be downgrading my chance at survival every day. Is it really surprising that they’re fucking around about telling you what they want?” He couldn’t control the movement of his hands, or the rising anger in his voice. This man was his likely executioner and Abstergo was the tyrant that put him here. There was nothing (not-a-thing) to lose.

Malik smiled at him and it wasn’t cruel-and-vicious the way it should have been across the face of a monster. It was a sweet-fond-sort of look. The one that grandfathers gave unruly grandchildren just before they foisted them back off on their parents. “Let us make a deal.”

“Does the deal involve you not killing me?” Desmond put his elbows on the table when he leaned forward. His curled hands were inches away from Malik’s and the brief space between them seemed like thin cover for the fast-fast beat of his heart and the utter panic in his chest. 

“I will not kill you unless you ask me to,” Malik said. “Every day you come, I will ask you to perform a task for me. If you agree to do so I will answer one question fully and truthfully. If you choose not to perform the task, I will say nothing.”

Oh-God but that sounded like the worst idea that anyone ever had. “We’re prisoners and you want to play truth or dare?”

Malik’s eyebrows twitched in annoyance at the suggestion but he inclined his head. “You will not be coerced or forced into doing anything _by me_.” But beyond these walls, out and around there were plenty of people and things to coerce and force Desmond into obeying Malik’s every ridiculous whim. The clever-glint in Malik’s grin acknowledge that fine line.

“Fine, yes,” Desmond said.

“Let me break your finger,” Malik said.

Desmond was going to snap at him about physical violence and found himself biting his own tongue because ‘not killing’ was not the same as not hurting. “Are you going through some kind of violence withdrawal? Do you have tremors? Shakes? I hear there’s a twelve step program for problems like this.” But he looked at his two hands and thrust his left hand at Malik. 

The absolute calm with which Malik took his left ring finger in his hand and snapped the bone between his palm and his first knuckle was exactly the sort of thing nightmares were made of. The pain was a stab of fresh hell up-and-down his hand and arm and then an immediate red wet heat as Malik straightened the bone out again. His voice came through the cotton-rattle congested between Desmond’s ears.

“Long before they invented the hidden blade the Assassins demanded sacrifice. The means and methods have varied throughout the generations—before I destroyed them, there was one small brotherhood that demanded the sacrifice of one’s tongue. Assassins have been beaten, branded, mutilated and now, apparently, tattooed to prove their loyalty to the Creed.” Malik’s fingers were soft-as-flower petals against the swelling heat in Desmond’s hand. “Loyalty is such a strange notion. I have watched it drive men into the ground. I have watched it incite men to greatness. But for all of my trying, I have never found the source of it.”

Desmond pulled his hand free and concentrated on finding some sense of peace and nothingness between the throbs of pain. It wasn’t as severe as the time he had broken his arm but it was not insignificant. 

“My requests will not always be violent,” Malik said calmly.

“Why did you craft my family line?” Desmond said. His voice sounded watery like the waver of something hot and salty in this throat. 

Malik’s lips parted in a smile and his body reclined back into the chair. “What must it be like to be so mortal? Your worries are momentary and yet so heavy. If you would give it only a few more days, if you had read the many boxes of things they’d given you to read, the price you named for the bone I broke might not have been so cheap.” Then he shrugged that thought away. “Your family line is mine, in the only way that matters. You are the descendent of my soul mate.”

“But not you,” Desmond said, “your soul mate is a man?”

“Yes.”

Then it made sense. It made sense like Lucy shoving him face-first into a room with a murderer and Malik’s hand on his face and fifty-percent-chance of survival. “I look like him,” Desmond said so quietly the words might not have made it across his tongue at all.

“You are nearly identical to him,” Malik said. “Try to think of a better question for tomorrow, Desmond. You sell yourself too cheaply.” Then he was standing and walking away, dismissing any further attempts at conversation.

\--

It was Hammond, not Lucy that retrieved him from Malik’s cell. Hammond who was big-and-slow of step with a cruel-glint permanently caught in the corner of his grin. Lucy upheld the pretense of respect and politeness while Hammond cemented the reality of capture. No words were exchanged during the long walk back up-and-around and around again to the room where Desmond was being kept. 

“Think I could get some Tylenol or something?” Desmond asked when he was pushed back into his own personal hell hole.

Hammond’s answer was a quiet shake of his head and the shrieking-wheeze of a slammed door. Food came through the slat in the bottom of the door and Desmond ate the dry-and-tasteless food.

\--

Sleep was sparing at best. Some combination of the realization that Desmond had to live up to the expectations of an immortal man who took up professional person breeding in his spare time and the ache in his broken finger left his head choking on nightmares. (But his _face_ so calm and so detached, Malik’s perfect face when he broke Desmond’s bones with hardly an ounce of effort.) 

So Desmond slouched the wrong way on the bed, shoulders against one wall and feet against the other. He stared at the nothingness of the absolute darkness in the tiny little cell and thought of his life-before (all this). Not of the long-nights and late mornings of his bartending life. Not even of those first frigid years of freedom when he was as close to starving as he’d ever been in his life. 

He thought of his father in a constant rage, always on the verge of a rant. He thought of the compound where he was raised and the grueling demand of strength-and-endurance that woke him every morning of his life. Interrupting this-and-that were the lessons his father thought were important to impart. It was always in one of the out buildings with the plank-board walls offering meager protection against the harsh-cold of mid-winter. It was always with the sun barely peeking over the edge of the world. It was always the smell of fresh-turned-dirt frosty with winter dark and dark-roast coffee. Desmond had never learned anything worth knowing that he hadn’t learned with the smell of his father’s coffee growing heavy-and-hypnotic in his nose. 

“ _There are three things you must never forget,_ ” his father always said to him. “ _Never hurt the innocent. Remain anonymous—always but a blade in the crowd. Protect the brotherhood._ ”

Oh his father had been full straight up to his eyeballs with bullshit about an eternal war between Assassins and Templars. Desmond sank lower against the wall, brought his feet up higher so his knees were bent and his body was bowing in half. He closed his eyes and tried to remember his mother—managed a fuzzy picture of her turning-left (not right) with her hair in a tight ponytail at the back of her neck. He remembered her in imperfect details that way, always some distant thing. 

God, but wouldn’t his dad be ashamed of him now. Giving up fingers to mad man who couldn’t die. (Be smarter, Desmond. That’s what his father would have said. You’re smarter than this, Desmond. Use your head, Desmond. Mistakes like that will get you killed, Desmond.)

He thought of Malik. He thought of the way Malik looked at him in between his strict indifference. Desmond thought of the tone of Malik’s voice when he said _you are nearly identical to him_. It sounded nothing-at-all like loathing but there was no wet whimper of want in it either. 

“I am so fucked,” Desmond said into the darkness. And then wished he hadn’t, wrinkled up his nose at the very thought. “So very fucked.”


	3. Chapter 3

Lucy came to him in the morning. She gave him two little white pills, a bottle with water in it and a silver package of toaster pastries that looked like they’d been hiding in the back of the pantry since the eighties. Desmond swallowed the pills, gulped the water and shoved the food into his mouth as he walked.

“Well that was stupid wasn’t it?” Lucy said to him (at _last_ ) when they were in the briefing room. There was a small medical kit sitting open and ready on the edge of the decaying table. She didn’t afford him enough time to answer the question before her nimble little fingers (so quick on a keyboard) were poking and prodding at his bruised finger. 

“What happened the nice girl you used to be?” Desmond asked. He waited for her to figure out the bone was already set and be satisfied with that realization. She picked up a roll of medical tape and motioned at him to hold the end of it against the inside of his middle finger. “Am I not as attractive when you don’t have me laying prone and at your mercy for hours?”

Her grin was anything in the world but flirty. Her eyes were like a cut across her face—naked-and-bare but blood-fucking-red. “I don’t suppose it would hurt anything for you to know I hate this place as much as you do. I’ve been here before, with some other idiot that thought he could outsmart us. Malik tore his ribs out and built a coat rack. It took us six days to get all of his body out of that room.”

“Just an idea,” Desmond said. “Maybe you should tell me what the hell I’m trying to accomplish instead of sending me in with half-ass lies that he can see through.”

She set the tape down again, leaned her hip against the table and put her arms across her chest. She was shorter-than smaller-than him but her arrogance was like a living thing filling the room. “You really think that a thing like him, a thing that’s been alive since quite possibly the dawn of human history, had no idea where the Apple is? You were in the room with him when he told you how much _time_ and _effort_ he put into crafting your family’s line. So he showed up in Italy to kill off the less impressive Auditores and then just disappeared when Ezio reached his peak? Read the damn papers, Desmond.” Then she was snapping the medical kit shut and storming out of the room with a click-clack-clatter of her heals against the hard concrete floors.

\--

_Italy 1476_ , the box said in letters as big as Desmond’s hand. There was layer of dust on the lid of the box that looked as it hadn’t been disturbed since long before Malik came to be a permanent resident of the Vault. Desmond sat on the floor with his elbow over the edge of the box and a flipped-open file of almost transparently thin paper spilling open on his lap. The first page was the summary of the whole contents.

It was four paragraphs long and it said exactly one thing: Malik Al-Sayf, the King of Swords, had resurfaced after nearly a hundred years of dormancy. He had taken up the hobby of watching (always watching) the Auditore family. He pushed-and-then-prodded people into place and when the time was exactly (perfectly) _right_ he ordered the father and the two brothers killed. 

Ezio was not to be captured. Ezio was not to be killed. 

When asked why this one son was to be spared, Malik had only told the Templars that ‘Ezio was a necessary evil’.

\--

Desmond was elbows deep in reading another badly-translated personal account of selling fruit to the King of Swords (Abstergo was thorough to a fault, apparently) when Hammond came back to escort him to visit his new friend. “So Malik founded this whole Templar thing?”

“Is that what you read in those papers?” Hammond said. But he didn’t care, not even in the least. If he had known the answer to the question, Desmond might have stood up just so he could have fallen over. 

“It says that he has the power to randomly show up and order you around. Seems a little strange considering how he’s being treated now. Did the Templars grow too big for their pants or did he do something so terrible even you can’t deal with him?” It was hard to imagine someone doing something so awful they couldn’t be trusted by a Templar. There was an echo of a groan of pain (or starvation) to add a bit of punctuation to the point Desmond was trying to make. He heard them sometimes, the other people that filled the cells of this terrible place. Their voices like whispering ghosts oozing through the old ventilation on a wave of sweat-warmed-air.

“Seems like the sort of question you should be asking someone that cares,” Hammond said. He reached down and grabbed Desmond by the elbow before hauling him to his feet like a disobedient child. The grip left a halo of pain on the surface of his skin that had-to-be blooming up pink under the long sleeves of the ugly gray shirt they’d given him to wear. “Find out what he knows about the Apple, assassin.”

“Sure,” Desmond said back. It was fear-not-common sense that stopped his tongue from adding a pile of words onto that single one. He had a dozen witty quips to add but the raw hatred in Hammond’s eyes was far more impressive.

\--

Down-down-around and into Malik’s room. The bloody carpet had been taken out and another garish one had replaced it. It was puke-pink with a tight cluster of flowers in the center and a border of the same sort of flowers that went all around the outside. There were long-slim-lines of white and gold that crisscrossed the empty spaces between the flowers. 

“Fire your decorator,” Desmond said. He stood in the awkward half-space between the end of the table and where Malik was sitting with his back to Desmond. He was looking up-at-the-wall, at the maps he had drawn there. His fingers were smudged with ink and splayed out across that ugly-ass-carpet. The strength of his arms brought into fine focus by the effort of holding himself at the angle required to see the highest map. “Everything in here looks like it escaped yard sale hell.”

“Take your shirt off, Desmond.” Malik said without looking at him.

“Is that your official request? The one for which I get to ask a question you answer?” He started walking, left his shoes (ugly, dirty and nearly useless at this point) beyond the rugs and stepped onto the rough surface of them in just his dingy almost-white socks. Malik was looking-sideways at him, neck arched and eyes narrowed before he murmured agreement. 

Desmond pulled the gray shirt up and over his head, sat on the rugs where Malik could see him and dropped the shirt into his lap. His skin prickled at the chill in the room and the open way Malik studied him. He wasn’t pale and he wasn’t weak but he wasn’t particularly exciting either. (At least, he told himself that over-and-over all during the long seconds Malik studied him.) 

“Why are you afraid?” Malik said.

“I thought I got to ask a question now.”

“Answer me.” Malik shifted so his body was facing Desmond. He made it look fluid-and-easy. He made sitting with his back straight and the full of his attention focused on Desmond seem so _natural_ it brought a pointed pain to the slouch of Desmond’s back. Malik didn’t bother to wait for him to answer either but caught a sudden grin as he said, “you are afraid of what I will do if I find you attractive.”

“There’s got to be a reason you didn’t kill your soul mate. And there has to be a reason you’re humoring our hosts by letting me live. Not that I don’t appreciate my life, but I’d rather know where this is going than having to worry about it.”

“Yes,” Malik said without pause. “I will ask for sex and sexual favors. I have been locked in this room for nearly fifty years. You could closely resemble an ottoman and I would most likely still distract myself with sexual fantasies about you. That you resemble my soul mate makes you only fractionally more attractive to me than a piece of shapely furniture.”

“Didn’t like him like that?” Desmond said. 

Malik laughed. “You are a poor replacement for him in that manner. What is your question?”

“Why did you start killing soul mates?”

Malik’s eyes widened and then narrowed again. He did not fidget or flinch but there was a noticeable shift in the atmosphere of the air as if he were fighting some deep impulse toward shame (or-fear). It did not rise to color his skin or his voice when he finally spoke:

\--

It was _important_ to note that things were different in the world Malik found himself freshly-reborn into. Memory failed him, as if it (too) had been severed with the thunderous cacophony of sound-light-and-pain had wrenched it out of his flesh. It was only a _feeling_ like the phantom sensation of _something else_ nagging at him whispering something like (this-is-not-right).

“I woke up in the sea,” Malik said as a way of starting. 

The world was not dense with people but sprinkled with them here-and-there in packs of three or four that huddled together in the dark. Malik came across them after his body finally touched on land. Here were creatures possessed of immortal greatness but crippled with confusion and fear.

“Walk with me, I said to them. They were desperate to be guided. Poor little fools.” 

So they walked, collecting one or two more and then another until their huddle of warm bodies had grown as vast a civilization as any living man-or-woman could remember. They sat in the mornings and they sat in the evenings and stared in awe at the sun and the stars. 

“They cried. They were so full of tears in those days. These pathetic little creatures that could not remember what had happened to them. Imagine herding a group of kittens through unknown terrain toward an unknown goal with no knowledge of what a kitten actually was. They spent hours of the day sitting in groups to talk about what we must be. They catalogued the differences in their flesh, the shape of their bodies and the oddity of these marks across our chests.”

But it was not their ignorance that drove Malik mad. It was the so-called-prophet that found their group. He welcomed them in all their terminal stupidity into his arms. And he coddled their fears and he eased their worry. The man called himself Kan, the knower of things. 

Malik’s grin-was-slip-sliding across his face. “Kan knew many things. He knew better than the idiots what great wealth could be found in numbers. I meant to gather them, and to guide them away from their own worthlessness but Kan meant to _rule_ them.”

There-was-no _competition_ but sweet-whispered-promises as Kan invited himself into Malik’s good graces. They fell together easily, the smartest of men who were left unburdened by the strange plague of sadness that had so-long-destroyed the others. Kan used his wealth of words and he used the strength of his _body_ to seduce Malik.

“But we are all fools in our youth. I fell into Kan’s trap with my eyes closed. It would not surprise the man that I’ve become to know he only meant to use me but it was a very shocking thing when it happened to me then.” 

They built a city with the labor of their men-and-women. A vast sprawling metropolis ( _relatively speaking_ ) with immortal man power. Kan made a temple under the stars and gave sermons on the nature of their ailments that drove the people into burning heights of emotion. Oh-Kan-could talk a man over the edge of a cliff into a raging fire and have them begging for another-sacred command. 

(“Did you love him,” Desmond asked when the story came to an uncertain pause. Malik’s face was a twitch of annoyance at the insinuation with a screwed-tight scowl of hate. There was only honesty in his voice when he said, “yes.”)

It was Kan that told the story of Gods-so-frightened by the power the immortals possessed that they tore them in half. He taught the people they were incomplete-and-lost without mates. He whipped up a frenzy of _need_ and when he offered the cure, there was nothing-at-all the people would not have done for him.

\--

“Kan knew I could not die. We could not die, not any of us. But he sentenced me to a dozen deaths to be carried out over a dozen days. I was stoned, burned, beheaded, drowned, crushed, hanged, run through, garroted, disemboweled, suffocated, poisoned and buried alive. Each day the people I had gathered and united came to kill me. Each day Kan accused me of being a traitor and a false king. He said it was ‘my kind’ that had brought on the Gods’ wrath. He named me a non-believer and his petty, small-minded followers sang his glory.” Malik was not looking at Desmond now. He was not looking at the walls or the carpets or even the exit with the faint halo of light around the edges. He looked only at his own hands and somewhere deeply inward. 

“You killed soul mates because he betrayed you?”

Malik sighed. “I killed Kan and the one hundred and fifty six men and women that obeyed his every word because he betrayed me. I came across the knowledge of how to kill them from a man who offered me a home when I wondered across him in the desert. He had found his soul mate and believing I was yearning for my own, he taught me the strengths-and-weaknesses we possessed.”

“That’s not right,” Desmond said. Because the boxes weren’t full of one hundred and fifty six petty little stories but stuffed full of a thousand stories of needless deaths. Malik had not slaked his bloodlust at one hundred and fifty six but hunted the _world_ to destroy anyone like him. “You killed them all.”

There again he looked at Desmond. He lounged in his superiority and the magnificence of his accomplishment as his tongue ran pink-and-wet across his lips. His eyes were lewdly gawking at Desmond’s naked skin (as it _crawled_ ) before he finally looked at Desmond’s _face_. “Mortals thrive on the ideas of right and wrong. I have watched you short tempered little men grow justice from resistant soil. This idea of morality did not come to you easily. It was beaten from you, coaxed through blood and broken bones as you ravaged the world in search of something bigger than yourselves.”

“Right and wrong does not exist when you’re immortal? You can live forever—unless your mate gets sick of you—so why not do whatever you want?” Desmond could feel the rosy blush of heat in his skin. It-was-his mother’s fucking-fault that he blushed in anger; her fault that he had delicate-skin. (His father had _loved_ that about him, smirked into a little smile every time he made Desmond so mad he turned pink.) “That must be really great for you then!”

“Careful Desmond,” Malik said (blandly), “you’re more attractive when you’re angry.”

Nothing in the world, not even the knowledge that he was being _goaded_ could have kept the heated flash of shame-and-embarrassment from shooting through Desmond’s entire body. It turned in his stomach and left the back of his throat tasting something like sulfur-scrambled-eggs. 

Malik moved quicker than Desmond reacted. He seemed to unfold like a spring jumping across the floor. But the sound his legs made when they moved on the carpet was more of a slither. Then his hand was hitting the wall behind Desmond’s back and his face was centimeters-away-from him with the ghost of heated breath like a damp fog. “How long can you hope to survive Desmond? A week, two weeks? Templars do not waste time on ventures they cannot gain from and they do not take kindly to failure. Perhaps it is time you stopped thinking like a man with a whole life left to live.”

“I asked you why you killed all those soul mates and you told me a sob story about how your boyfriend dumped you.”

Malik’s legs got tight at his sides and his hand went across Desmond’s mouth-and-nose as his other clutched at the back of his head. There was murder in his face as he leaned the full weight of his body into the grip he had on Desmond. It was impossible to suck air in through the tiny gaps between Malik’s fingers and the man did not even flinch at the feeble strikes Desmond landed against his sides. His face tore in little bloody streaks where Desmond clawed at his skin but even that did nothing but cause him to close his eyes. 

Panic kicked in with the wild churning of his body, the need to breathe shutting down everything but some deeper primal instinct to get free at all costs. But even that was useless against the rigid strength in Malik’s (smaller) body. His vision was spotting up black and his lungs were seizing in his chest at the urgent need for _air_. The whole of his stupid life was flicking before his eyes between bursts of random colors. His thoughts were here-there-and flying across the room in chaotic scatters of light and sound. 

Nothing-nothing made sense to him the way it should have even as his body started to give. He was sagging in exhaustion before the last grip of growing blackness took him over and it was in that second, that final second before Desmond passed out that Malik released him. 

Malik stood up as Desmond lurched to grab at him and stepped just beyond reach. “Catch your breath Desmond. That was only one of twelve.”

“What?” Desmond gasped. He was lying on his side on the uncomfortable-ugly-carpets with his hand stretched out in front of him. It tingled in a distracting sort of way, useless and limp as he gulped in the air he was sure he’d never taste again. 

“Kan was not my boyfriend, you idiot mortal. Kan was a tyrant masquerading as a prophet.” Malik kicked him in the shoulder so that he was lying flat on his back and Desmond was all but powerless against him. Malik’s knees pinned his arms in place as he put his hand across Desmond’s mouth again. “Kan seduced me, yes. Kan offered me something I could not find in the foolish whimpering idiots I had gathered. Imagine being the only one of your kind, Desmond. Imagine a world where it is only you and one other that knows the terrible truth.” 

Malik stopped speaking as Desmond’s vision started spotting up with colors and his useless attempts at freedom grew weak(er). Then he pulled back and scooted back so that he was sitting at Desmond’s waist while he watched him suck in air. 

“We were ripped in half, mortal. It is a feeling you cannot begin to imagine. It has been cleansed from your blood. Loneliness you feel is a pale comparison to the unending torment of having been cleaved in half. Kan knew this, and he knew our weakness—the need to have something to fill the space where our mates had been. He fucked me.” Malik leaned forward again, put both of his hands on Desmond’s chest and pushed it down with the full of his weight so that even when he did breath in it was not enough to slake the thirst for oxygen he felt. “He called me his equal and he filled my head with his voice and his words and his promises. And when he had taken over ruling the people I had tried to save he sat as close to me as I am to you.” Malik leaned forward enough that Desmond could make out every vivid detail of his face. “And he smiled when they broke my bones and spilled my blood and tore my body inside out.” And with that Malik shoved himself up and away. 

Desmond was gagging, rolling over to his hands and knees as he tried-and-tried-but-couldn’t catch his breath. Malik’s feet were silent against the carpet but the looming presence was _loud_ (even in silence). Desmond tried to move forward but Malik caught him by the arm and dragged him back. “Please don’t,” Desmond said. (But it wasn’t _his_ voice, not as he had ever heard it before, not as he ever wished to hear it again.)

“Tell me why I killed them,” Malik said, “and I will not.”

There were tears in Desmond’s eyes and a wilting fear in his head. It felt like his brain was turning to cotton between his ears and even the thoughts he had-to-think (how to live, how not to die) were starting to _hurt_. Dragging an idea out of the mess brought a ragged sob to his lips that he couldn’t stop. “Because they deserved to die.”

Malik caught his face and turned it around to look at him. “Yes.” Then he slapped Desmond’s cheek and moved away from him. 

\--

It might have been a relief if Desmond slept through the dreary lull of time he spent lying against Malik’s hideous rugs. It would have been something welcome, even. Instead he was left awake, back to the wall and legs pulled up close his body with the burning-pain-of phantom fingers against his mouth and the bruised-knowledge of his weakness. 

Nothing had been broken, no lasting harm had been done. His lungs had long-since ceased to burn and his head had cleared. There were no marks on him and no marks left on Malik. The only evidence that the whole ordeal had happened at all was the blood under Desmond’s fingernails. It was little comfort to know he’d inconvenienced Malik in any way.

Desmond stood up, after some time, and crossed the room to where Malik was sitting at the little table wedged up against the wall. The dates he had brought days ago were still sitting there (uneaten). Desmond did not wait to be invited but pulled out the chair opposite Malik and sat himself in it.

“What about the others?” Desmond said. His voice was raw but steady. “What about the ones you killed that had done nothing to you?”

“Research,” Malik said with a dismissive motion of his hand. “Sport. I did not kill as many as the Templars history attributes to my name. They claim I slaughtered all of my kind but there have been many factions that worked against the unholy element of immortals.”

“At your bidding,” Desmond said.

Malik smiled. “I set a few men on the path. Men that had been enslaved by immortals. They were eager to test the methods I offered them. When the art had been perfected, I took it and used it to my own advantage. Lucy will not like that you did not ask what you have been sent to find out.”

“I don’t like that Lucy sends me in here to be suffocated by a madman. We all have to learn to live with our own disappointment.” The difference between their individual unhappiness was that Desmond was a prisoner and a pawn who had zero advantages against these bigger-stronger-people. “I’m sorry about what happened with Kan.”

“He was, as well, in the end.” Then Malik simply ceased speaking.

\--

Lucy collected him (eventually) with a gun in her hand and a refreshing glint of true fear in her eyes. Desmond made a show of limping-slowly-to-his-freedom until she reached into through the door far enough to grab and drag him out. Out in the moat the light _was blinding_. He narrowed his eyes and Lucy turned around to punch him in the face.

“You stupid, arrogant little bastard!” she shouted at him. Then she caught his hair in her first and bashed his sore face into her bony knee. The cracking pain in his nose sent a shower of blood pouring out and knocked him flat against the wall behind his back. Lucy was right-there-in his face with a gun pressed to his forehead and her teeth bared with a hiss of wet-sucking-breath. “Explain yourself.”

It was-but-wasn’t the same-sensation of fear he’d felt with Malik’s hand across his mouth. Lucy-was-but-wasn’t the sort of _thing_ that Malik was. Desmond tipped his head back against the wall and brought his fingers up to pinch at the gritty-white-pain in his nose. “I don’t want to be a coat rack,” he said.

“This isn’t a game,” Lucy said to him. The emphasis was an extra snap of pressure of the barrel of the gun against his forehead. “If you fail to do what you are told, there will be consequences.”

Desmond didn’t say a word. 

She pulled away. “Get up Desmond.”

\--

There was no dinner, only a bottle of water and the uncomfortable pallet on the floor of his tiny room. The stink of his bathroom-bucket made the air taste thick-and-yellow when he breathed. Coupled with the phantom sensation of being suffocated and the very real ache of his (possibly) broken nose, sleep took its sweet time finding him. 

It came like a blanket, warm-and-welcome.


	4. Chapter 4

Morning brought Hammond with meaty fists, dragging him down the black hallways without a word of greeting. The briefing room was hot-as-fire with the stench of rotting bodies piped in just to make his stomach roll. Hammond gave him a smirking-little-smile as he shoved a fistful of granola bars into his gut and a tall thermos of water. 

“Behave yourself,” Hammond said.

Desmond only-just-barely managed to wait until the man was gone before he shoved the food in his mouth with ravenous hunger. He gulped the room-warm water and wiped his dirty face on the back of his sleeve. The boxes had been shifted around in his absence, the one containing every useless scrap of information they had collected on Malik’s time in Italy was neatly set aside and one labelled ‘Masyaf’ was sitting on the table.

“What happened at Masyaf?” Desmond said to the box. He pulled his shirt up to cover his face (and that did little to block the stench) before he pulled the box toward himself and flipped the lid off. The summation was sitting on top of a stack of folders. It said (only): First known use of the name Malik Al-Sayf, initial discovery of the Apple. 

\--

History wrote it like this:

Masyaf was an Assassin stronghold, one of the greatest in the whole of the world, where children were turned into murders and sent to secure the world’s free will. Malik Al-Sayf was one of many, a brother and a loyal assassin. 

History said:

Malik lost-an-arm in a failed attack. Malik recovered the artifact known as The Apple and delivered it to Al Mualim. He was accordingly rewarded with an honorable position as Dai and Rafiq of the Jerusalem bureau. 

History even said:

Malik-aided in saving Masyaf from the traitorous actions of their mentor Al Mualim after the Apple-of-Eden drove the man mad. The description of the battle (poor translated, as far as Desmond could tell) was a bloodless victory over an uncertain enemy. It was not Malik-history-remembered as victor but a disgraced assassin named Altair Ibn-La’Ahad. Altair went on to become some kind of legend in Assassin’s official history.

\--

“Shit,” Desmond mumbled. He rubbed his forehead with his thumb and forefinger of his right hand. The spread of papers all around him were lies-stacked-on-lies-stacked-on lies. The just-off not-quite-rightness of them set poorly against the picture Malik presented. The man, himself, with both arms and immortal glory discounted nearly all of the story of Masyaf. “History is written by the victors,” Desmond whispered into the papers.

His father had told him that, when he went on his rants of ‘nothing is true’ and the distortion of facts at the hands of the Templars. He had been full of spit and vigor and _doubt_ that must have robbed him of comfort. Desmond had run-like-hell from a life that afforded him not a single moment of peace and that same bullshit had found him again.

It was his father’s voice in his head when he looked through the translated copies of ‘the Codex’ (something Ezio had spent far too much time retrieving as far as Desmond was concerned). Here-and-there in the margins of the original documents were little pictures and doodles and something that looked far-too-much like words left untranslated. (Nothing is true, said his father.) 

Altair married a woman named Maria and had fat-little-babies. Malik was beheaded for treason. 

“Still has a head,” Desmond said to the papers. (Smart boys stay alive.)

\--

It was hours-and-hours later before the door opened again. Desmond had given up on reading anything further after his head started to spin from the terrible noxious odor of slow-death circulating the room. He was hiding in the corner where the smell was the least gut-turning with his face covered by his shirt. With his eyes closed the spinning in his head was bearable (at least). 

“It was brought to my attention that the monster in the basement does not take kindly to other people touching his toys.” Lucy’s voice was distant, drifting through the room to land somewhere over his head. “But, as you may have noticed there are at least a thousand ways we can _reprimand_ you that don’t leave a mark.” 

“Yeah,” Desmond mumbled to his knees, “because I was so worried there wasn’t.” The layers of cloth around his head caught most of his voice. Lucy didn’t _reprimand_ him for his attempt at back talk at all. He stuck his head back through the neck of his shirt and looked over at her. The door was open and the stale hallway air was leeching away some of the odor from inside the briefing room. Even out there where the smell could not possibly be as strong, Lucy was wrinkling her nose. “Something wrong?” Desmond said.

“Get up, Desmond,” Lucy said.

He got up because up-was-out. It didn’t matter why he moved because any reason for his obedience was a good enough reason for Lucy to believe she won. The way his body crashed into the darkened hallway with grateful gulps of semi-fresh air was disgustingly obvious proof that she had. 

“Did you enjoy your reading?” Lucy asked (smartly). Then she motioned him to follow her. 

“This Altair guy, the one that had the Apple, is he Malik’s soul mate?” Desmond asked.

Lucy snorted at that idea like it was insane. “No. Altair’s skeleton was found in a library by Ezio Auditore. Assuming that these things can even degrade over time—which they can’t—there is no way Altair would have had enough time to become a skeleton. He entered the library in 1257 and Ezio found him in 1510. We’ve had the monster in our basement for fifty years and he hasn’t shown even the slightest sign of degrading. He does not eat or drink. He hasn’t been exposed to sunlight. He recovers easily and quickly from any attempt to kill him. Altair is not an immortal.” The angrier her voice got the faster her footsteps. 

Desmond was lagging behind her. Every quick-step brought him closer to a madman that liked to break his fingers and suffocate him for fun. (Oh, and apparently harbored sexual desires toward him and shapely furniture.) “Someone at Masyaf was Malik’s soul mate,” Desmond said.

“Congratulations, Desmond. You know now as much as we know.” She turned in the puddle of blinking light down the hall from where he’d simply given up on walking. The last intersection was just behind his back and the sort distance between them seemed to stretch the length of a football field (or two) for how tired he was and how very much he did not want to go back into that room. “Keep moving, Desmond.”

“You said you built this place to keep the other one out,” Desmond said. He dragged his feet until Lucy’s placid look of annoyance sharpened into something like homicidal intent. “Do you mean his soul mate?”

“Maybe,” Lucy said. “Maybe just a fan of his that’s very intent on finding him. Malik has been captured before. Before Masyaf he simply escaped. There is one very riveting account where he sat in the jail until it collapsed around him. But after Masyaf—we are the first prison that’s successfully held him for a period longer than five days. Either he lost his follower, his soul mate decided he doesn’t care, or the Vault is the most effective prison ever built.”

“For the purposes of your arrogance do you just assume the latter?” Desmond asked. They were standing outside the doors leading the moat. The thrum of his heart was loud enough in his head that even Lucy should have been able to hear it. 

“For the purposes of staying alive, we assume nothing.” The doors opened to the blinding-light of the moat. Lucy grabbed him by the extra scrap of fabric at his elbow and pulled him over to the door to Malik’s room. There she shoved a bottle into his hand without so much as a touch of pink embarrassment on her face. “If he wants to fuck you, let him.” Then she hit the button to activate the door.

\--

So there he was, blushing hot-and-red, holding an economy sized bottle of lube with Malik doing some kind of stretch across the room not even bothering to look up long enough to acknowledge his presence. There he was, Desmond-fucking-Miles, failed assassin, somewhat-impressive bartender, recently-kidnapped-prisoner, contemplating if he could take another fucking second. 

He was _absorbed_ in trying to figure out what he was willing to give up to _live_ when his life expectancy was growing shorter by the day and there was no way _out_. Exhaustion was a gray-black weight in the center of his body where the gnawing pain of starvation was drawing tight-tight-tighter in a swollen-knot of pain. And there were tears in his eyes that did nothing but sting at the raw edges of his split skin. 

Desmond-didn’t-hear Malik move, didn’t even see him until the hand touched his face. Malik tipped his face up. There was no-expression on his face, no light in his eyes, but a quiet-and-cold observation before he looked down at the bottle in Desmond’s hand. 

“Someone likes you,” Malik said blandly. He might as well have been commenting on a free drink at the bar. Then he took the bottle and set it to the side on the table with a sense of finality that did nothing-at-all to reassure Desmond of _anything_. “Come,” Malik said. 

“No,” Desmond said. He dug his feet in against the ground when Malik took his hand. There was no weight in it, no finality, not even the barest hint of determination against the inevitable conclusion. Malik barely had to tug at his arm before Desmond fell into step behind him. It was six-and-half steps to the edge of the carpets-and-cushions where Malik must have slept. 

“Shoes,” Malik said to him.

Desmond toed his shoes off and stood there with a persistent shiver as Malik pulled his shirt off with a grimace of distaste at the lingering smell on it. His hands were warm-and-smooth against Desmond’s skin here-and-there when they touched but the accidental grazes still left him feeling cold. “Where is the Apple, Malik?”

Malik frowned at him when he opened his eyes. He pushed him down and (God-help-him) Desmond went. Malik followed after him, laid on the cushions before pulling Desmond the rest of the way to the ground. His voice was a little-white-whisper against Desmond’s ear when he said, “do not break for them, Desmond. These petty tyrants are not worth the power you would surrender to them.”

“Don’t act like you’re better.” Desmond’s voice was a wheeze. 

“I am better. You are better. This is what I have told you—your bloodline was crafted to be better. You have the greater strength than they can imagine in your veins. These petty offenses will be matched and doubled.” (What was it Lucy had said to him, something about _it had come to her attention Malik didn’t like people touching his toys_.) “Give them nothing, Desmond.”

“Should I give it to you then?” Desmond said. He turned his head to look at Malik. Wished-he-hadn’t because with-his-eyes closed, he wouldn’t-have-seen Malik move. He wouldn’t have known the man was crawling on top of him, wouldn’t have known his legs were going to be pushed open until he felt it happen. “What do you want?” Desmond asked loud-louder now.

“Oral sex,” Malik said. He was nodding his head even as Desmond balled up his fists to put his refusal into a language Malik seemed most fluent in. The bastard was relaxed on his knees between Desmond’s spread thighs with his two hands hot-as-fire spread across the low waistband of his Abstergo-issued prisoner-slacks with all the confidence in the world. “I imagine if you brought them an answer they’d give you something decent to eat. You look thinner, Desmond. What _have_ they been feeding you?”

“Not your dick,” Desmond snapped back.

“Shame. It probably tastes better than their usual fare. Answer, Desmond.” There again, he was nodding his head. His thumbs dug into soft belly flesh in a way that invited no trust and offered no reassurances. 

“Fine,” Desmond said.

“Good boy,” Malik said. Then he leaned forward again, the roughness of his cheek against Desmond’s. “Ask me your real question,” Malik whispered.

“Why would you fake losing an arm for thirty seven years?” Desmond said. “How?”

Malik made an appreciative little sound in the back of his throat. “Open your mouth, Desmond,” Malik said loud against the side of his cheek. He did not move away but his fingers were sliding-down under the waist band of his pants. Desmond’s hands grabbed at Malik’s wrists as he tried to pull his legs shut and was successful only in making Malik smile. “Close your eyes, Desmond. Pant but do not moan.”

“What?” Desmond hissed back at him. 

“Pant, do not moan.” Then Malik was slipping down the way Desmond’s pants were being pulled down. The grip Desmond had on Malik’s wrists tightened until he was shaken off and there was nowhere to put his hands except against the carpet as he got on his elbows to stare down at the black-black hair on the top of Malik’s head. But he was shoved flat again in the next instant just before Malik’s free hand gripped his dick and gave it an appraising sort of squeeze. “Stop stalling,” Malik said loud enough in the room that it made Desmond jump.

“Not like I’ve done this before,” Desmond snapped back. He closed his eyes and thought-about-anything but _this_. Tried to focus on Ashley-at-the bar who used to flirt with him all the time. Ashley (at the bar) who dyed her hair blonde in the summer and asked about his scar and laughed at his stupid jokes. Ashley at the bar who won the wet T-shirt contest and wore short skirts and had arms like a part-time body builder. 

“Shame is a mortal invention,” Malik said. His hand was pumping up-down Desmond’s dick as his voice disapproved of his every-decision. “Be less predictable, Desmond. Open your mouth.”

It was anger that flashed through him at those words. Anger like an electric shock. Anger that fisted his fingers in Malik’s dark-black-hair and shoved his face down into his crotch. Anger that rolled and coiled in his chest like something _living_ and _hungry_ (set on devouring him). But it was shock that made him go suddenly cold when Malik’s mouth slid down over his penis all-warm-and-wet. Desmond’s breath came out punched-and-hollow.

(Ashley, he thought, who smiled at him and flirted with him and refused to date him. Ashley who wanted things bigger and better than the bar she frequented. Ashley who looked good in pink lipstick and bright-blue nail polish wearing short skirts and tall boots. God, Ashley who he thought about on her knees with her mouth stretched full of him and the long-long-feather of her eyelashes against her pretty-white-cheeks.)

Malik was slurping at his dick (finally hard, at least) with his head bobbing up and down with the greatest of ease. 

Desmond panted like he was told. He kept his eyes shut (like he was told).

\--

Malik laid at his side in the aftermath of his orgasm. Malik coiled around his body with all the protective ownership of a real lover—arm and leg across Desmond’s most-bared-body. The stink of his own unwashed skin an echo in the catch of Malik’s breath. But Desmond felt pink-all-over and it was such a welcome sort of feeling. 

No, it wasn’t that, but Malik’s voice in his ear saying, “he said he would give me nothing if I did not prove my loyalty. He said he’d rather die than believe a liar like me. I cut my own arm off three times a day for thirty seven years to prove I was not the monster he believed me to be.” 

Desmond licked his lips, turned his head, looked right at Malik’s face and said (so-very-quietly), “Altair?”

Malik kissed him. It was brief, blunt and brutal before it was gone. Then he was shoving himself up-and-away, back on his feet with a grunt of effort. “That was tedious. Do not worry. You will get better.”

Desmond made a loud noise of disgust. He said, “where is the Apple, Malik?”

“Ezio’s Apple is buried in Italy. That is all I know.”

“Ezio’s Apple?” Desmond repeated. He hadn’t moved other than to roll his head toward where Malik had gone to sit at the table. The dingy-but-soft fabric of his loose pants was clinging to his thighs and his curve of his ass in an indecent kind of way. (Something Desmond might have gone the whole of his life without noticing, really. If not for how he was laid out and naked on the floor.) “How many Apples are there?”

“Two, at least,” Malik said. “They come from a time before mine. Altair was buried with one and Ezio buried one.” Malik was smelling the dates again, holding them in front of his face and drawing the scent of them in with the deepest of concentration and the most profound look of _longing_ Desmond might have ever seen. When his eyes opened again they were just little slits in his face and the hungry part of his lips made Malik seem-powerless-not-powerful. “I discovered in the very beginning that I do not have to eat. Mortals found it unsettling when I lived among them, the practice of existing but not consuming. It was the want to fit seamlessly into the mortal’s little world that I bothered to take up the practice at all. But of all the things that I have tasted, this is the one I cannot forget.”

“Why don’t you eat it then?” 

Malik set the fruit back on the table with delicate care. “Not now.” He came back, stepped over Desmond’s body and crouched over him to grab his pants and pull them up again. Once Desmond was covered, Malik slid to the side and laid next to him. “Sleep, Desmond. I do not ask for sacrifices I am unwilling to reward.” 

“Yesterday you tried to kill me.”

Malik’s lips quirked up in a smirk at the memory. His voice was low (affectionate) but not a whisper. “I was angry yesterday and I did not ask for anything. I took it by force. I am asking for your trust and loyalty. You must chose a master to serve, Desmond.”

“How can I trust you when you seem perpetually pissed at me? What happens next time you decide it’s easier to take something by force?” Desmond asked. He rolled onto his side (facing Malik) and tugged at the cushions here-and-there until they were comfortable against his face and body. He felt weighted-and-still. (Not _safe_ , but safe enough.) They were talking in whispers (for imagined privacy, perhaps). 

“I take it,” Malik said. As if it were the only obvious answer in the world. It was what Desmond was expecting but not-what-he-wanted to hear. The feeling of marginal safety slipped right out from under him. In its place there was a shiver of dread that seemed to vibrate out of the very marrow in his bones. Malik’s hand on his arm was anything-but-comforting even with the soft swipe of his thumb across the worn-out-fabric of his shirt. 

“Don’t touch me,” Desmond said. 

Malik moved his hand without a moment of hesitation. There was a glimmer of annoyance in his expression. The sort of look that arrogant assholes at bars gave women who stood up for themselves. The look of denial-turned-to-rage that had always left Desmond with a filthy-kind-of-feeling. “Sleep, Desmond,” Malik said again.

\--

Sleep teased-him but did not deliver on the muggy sort of promises that dragged his eyes shut and kept him drifting in a gray half-stupor. Malik was still at his side and the lack of sound that his stillness brought kept shaking Desmond back into full awareness. But it lulled him back into a half-sleep again.

When his escort came thumping-on-the-door, Malik was sitting with his back against the wall and his legs crossed in front of him. He looked as if he were meditating. Even the resounding banging at the door did not cause him to shake from the meditation. Desmond picked himself up off the floor and grabbed his shoes before he padded over to the door.

“I’m here,” he shouted back.  
The door opened with an efficient snap and Lucy grinned right-at-his-face because she-knew what he had(n’t) done. It wasn’t until the door was closed that she said, “very good, Desmond.” Then she flicked a take-out menu at him. “Pick whatever you like. I’ll have them bring it to your room.”

Desmond was hungry-and-tired with a side dish of shame. So he kept his mouth shut and he looked through the menu whenever they passed through a puddle of blinking light. “Number six,” he said, “two of them if you’re feeling especially proud.”

“I told you, Desmond. We like to reward results.” Then she motioned him into his little cell with his creeping-black-bed mates and shut the door behind him.


	5. Chapter 5

Like clockwork, the baby got hungry at three-thirty in the morning. It had left Lena a tired husk of a real person in those first days when everything-was-sacred and everything-was-urgent and there was not a single moment of a single day that she could manage to pry herself away from the child. Altair had not attempted to separate the two of them but laid his offer to attend to the baby out every night at dinner.

“I don’t sleep as much as you, anyway,” he often said.

The baby was four months old before Lena gave, rolled into him in the night when the static-and-sobbing broke through the baby monitor sitting on her side of the table. Her elbow was sharp as a knife against his ribs when she told him, “baby.”

Altair crawled out of bed, tiptoed down the hall and into the baby’s room. The boy was pink in his chubby-round cheeks that shook when he cried. Like all of the babies before him, he had been born with that sense of immediacy. Every single need he felt required immediate satisfaction or a feeling of despair broke through his tiny chest like snapping little cries. Altair rolled him up in a blanket and carried him down to the kitchen where the floors were cool and the windows were still midnight-black. 

The baby laid against his chest while the bottle warmed and once his need for food and a fresh diaper had been met, his soft-little-face grew lax and sweaty against the scar over Altair’s chest. They spent the rest of the night on the couch with the creaking silence of the old house over their head as a dreary little lullaby.

\--

Lena liked to accost him in the mid-afternoon when he was walking-through-the door from (work). Her fingers smelled-like, tasted-like cookies-batter and dish-soap. Her body was firm and insistent against his as she mouthed sweaty words like, “be quiet, the baby just went to sleep,” as she dragged him into the downstairs guest room where the sheets were changed with increasing frequency. 

Her panties shimmy-shook down her thighs as she dragged his hand down between her thighs and his groan barely drowned out the wicked little catch of her breath. She was always-wet-for-him, always greedy to have him close to her in a way that defied everything he ever-believed-true. Her wet tongue was sinful against his but the strength of her arms was what dragged a raw need from the pit of his gut.

“Now,” she bit into his neck when the motion of his fingers on her reached a fever-pitch. Her hips pressed back against his light touches and her greedy-greedy-hands pulled his pants down to his thighs. His dick throbbed in obedience to her whims as she pulled him down and in. And her fingernails drew blood that was dried and gone again.

“Let’s never get married,” Lena said to him with her hair in knotted tangles against the guest-room-pillows. Her shirt was shoved up to her armpits and her skirt was flipped up over her stomach. The damp-wet curl of her pubic hair was tacky against his palm when he cupped his hand across it. Everywhere he touched her she was hot-and-every little brush of his skin on hers seemed to draw a sigh of sound. “My parents were married for forty years. Mom said they just stopped having sex after I was born. God, can you imagine?” Then she was rolling back over him with her tongue in his mouth and her two hands hanging onto his face.

\--

The age-old-argument had a new twist like this: 

“Can’t you just get over your beach phobia long enough to take the baby?”

“I don’t think you can simply get over a phobia. The baby does not need to go to a beach, anyway. There is a pool he can splash in if he wants and a sandbox at the park if you want.”

“That sandbox at the park is a cat shit box,” Lena said. “I want you to come with me. Promise me that you’ll work on it.”

“I promise.” 

\--

Lena had this brother named Ronald who _preferred_ to be called ‘Ro’ and showed up begging for money and favors every odd number month. His voice-and-his-mouth were wet with blood and his eyes were pink with spoiled promises. 

“Come on,” Ro said when he thought Altair was safely tucked away in another room. “Come on, Lena. Lee-lee, remember when we were kids and we swore that we’d never end up like Mom and her brother? Remember we never got to see Uncle Harry? Mom burned his pictures—is that what you want for—” but the silence lagged one half second too long.

“Are you serious?” Lena snapped back. “Are you fucking _serious_ right now? You don’t give a fuck about our relationship. You don’t even know the name of my _child_. No, I’m not helping you this time. Even if I could—which I can’t—I wouldn’t. You’re a drunk and an idiot and I’m done. Go to rehab.”

“Lee—” His hands were grabbing at Lena was she was _strong_ and even with two fists gripping at her arm he couldn’t keep a hold of her. The sharp sound of her hand on his face was a wicked and pleasing echo in the space between him-and-them. 

“No,” Lena said. Then she stomped across the floor away from him, burst out through the swinging door that blocked the kitchen from the living room beyond. There were tears on her desperately miserable face when she saw him standing there. “God, did you have to just stand there and listen?”

“I’m sorry,” Altair said. For the pain in her face, for the brother she’d been stuck with, for his own guilty eavesdropping. Then he hooked his hand around the back of her neck and pulled her closer to him. She came with halting steps before melting in place against his chest. Her blunt fingers digging into his shirt as she bit back the tears she was no good at shedding. “It’ll be okay,” he promised her.

“No it’s not,” Lena said into his shirt. The sound of the back door slamming shut made her jump. “He’s going to kill himself sooner or later. I just—I can’t keep enabling that.”

Altair said nothing to that, just hugged her until she wanted to be free.

\--

Thursdays, Lena went out with her friends—a group of perfumed women from where Lena used to work that talked loud and fast about the things (and men, and women) they’d done and where they wanted to go in their lives. They filled Lena head-to-toes with little stitches and twinges of need for things she didn’t have. 

Altair spent Thursday nights with his feet braced against the wall and his knees bent at an easy slant so the baby fit neatly against his thighs. His back to the ground and a couch cushion as a pillow was a comfortable enough way to pass time. His finger was larger-than the baby’s whole fist.

Other men, the friends he’d collected for show (more or less) they were possessed with mortal terror of missing-out-on things. But it wasn’t these quiet little moments with a drowsy baby bubbling grins and mirroring smiles. Those men were worried over the newest of this and the rarest of that and the best of everything. They drove themselves to early graves over foolish things (like money) and drown their dissatisfaction with affairs and alcohol and bad choices. 

“We have so little time,” Altair told his baby, “do not hurry to grow, little one. Let me cherish this a while longer.” 

Oh and how his baby smiled at him, at the sound of his voice in a low tone. The way his words slid funny and misshapen in a dozen-different languages. All of them sloshing fluidly around in his head where the things from long-long ago took up space. His hands fit easily around the baby’s skull when he brushed his fingers through the whisper-soft hair. 

\--

The truth remained, however. Lena had tiptoed around it for five-or-six years, accepting at face-value how little Altair changed. How was perpetually fixed at the same state no matter how the years changed her. How he was never ill. How he was never (not-once-ever) injured. 

Lena howled over stretch marks, lost-and-gain weight, stubbed toes and paper cuts. She mourned lines on her face and fought a constant raging war against the perception of creeping age. 

\--

Now, it was Lena’s body against his and her fingers soft-and-cool against the scar on his chest. “You have such a strong heart,” she said in a soft-little-sigh like it was a thought that rattled around in her skull now-and-again. Her palm slid flat against his chest as if she could feel the beating of it through his flesh and bones. 

“I do now,” he assured her. “It was weak before.” The-lie-was (and wasn’t a lie) that he had been a sick-and-weak-hearted child that would-have-died if he hadn’t had a transplant. The garish and twisted looking scar brought the sweetest look of hope-and-gratitude to Lena’s face. He imagined (but couldn’t know) that she must have been whispering soft little thank yous the imagined dead man for his glorious sacrifice. “Sleep,” he said softly back to her.

“Stay with me,” Lena whispered back. Her arms were around his chest like chains.

\--

The headaches came on slowly. At first, little more than the obnoxious glare of light caught in his eye—enough to give anyone the slight feeling of pain in the front of their skulls. Then, the feeling of claustrophobia in a crowd that settled center-skull and gave him twitching fingers and tight fists while he looked for exits. 

These things had happened to him before; nothing to worry over at all. Now-and-again he had the urge to run (and run and run until there was no ground he had not covered). The desire would suffocate itself in a matter of time and he would fall easily, seamlessly back into place next to Lena. 

But the headaches persisted, nagged him at night and woke him from blank dreams when he slept. They caught in the back of his throat like a bad taste twisted in his gut over lunch. The headaches came like blood in his mouth and a throb in his skull.

\--

Altair fought back as long as he could manage. He took pills that would do nothing to help the pain. He avoided large crowds and small crowds and all crowds. Work suffered and Lena started to worry. The baby who had always-always fallen asleep against his chest was a sobbing mess of limbs and red face, inconsolable at four in the morning.

(I could snap his neck) Altair thought in a brief flash of something white-hot-and-far more painful than he could ignore. The agony of loneliness made everything around him wash out all at once. It was a crystalline moment of clarity, as if the earth itself had folded in half and reduced the space between here-and-there to a single exhaled breath. A phantom voice was against the back of his ear and the possessive grip of strong hands was squeezing-squeezing at his ribs so he could hardly breathe.

Altair put the baby on the couch and sat on the coffee table with tears in his eyes that he could not have stopped even if he had wanted to. His heart (strong heart) was racing-racing against his ribs as if it meant to rip itself free. The blood in his veins was boiling up pink on his skin. It did not pass easily, but sank its relentless teeth into his hide and held on until the baby had exhausted himself with tears and fell asleep.

But it kept on, tightening and tightening until every breath was laced-with fire, scratching out of his throat. His fingers were digging at his scalp with his palms pressed against his temples as his vision narrowed-down to a tunnel (all black on every side) save for the lax little face of his sleeping child. 

This baby, _his_ baby, that he had seen and held and loved every moment of its life. This baby who had once been nothing more than a collection of cells inside of Lena—this baby that he had talked to in the middle of the night when Lena was sleeping, the one he had sang to while Lena groaned unhappily over her ungainly swollen belly. _This baby_ that had his eyes and the dusty brown color of his hair. 

(Kill it,) was a whisper in his skull. That nagging-itching-knotted thing that grew outward from the center of his skull. It spread through his body like the rage of his blood. His muscles were twitching and his nails were covered in blood he had dug out of his own flesh. 

Altair moved with the quick-step of a snapping-bands, up and over and away from the baby. In the kitchen with a flickering light above the sink and the front of the fridge covered in baby-articles and grocery-lists. His baby’s smiling little face peeking out of a frame over the little table they’d wedged in the corner for early-morning-breakfast. His teeth were wet and bare and _cold_ with the frantic pant of his breath.

“No,” he growled back. He tore open the drawer closest to the stove and pulled the sharpest-of-the-knives out. It glinted silver-and-wicked in the low flickering light. The weight of it was lethal in his grip. His eyes were sliding closed as the phantom feeling of water rushed in all around him. Light was spiraling up-and-away and there was only blackness behind his eyes and in the nothing space between his ears. Salt-water and slow-death filled his body in an icy-cold grip that left him coated in sweat and shaking. The crushing weight of water-and-gravity was sucking him down into the blackness again.

“No!” he screamed back at it. The knife did not slide smoothly through his flesh. It chipped along his ribs before it drove into his madly beating heart. The pain was miniscule in comparison to the panic of moments-before but it was still real and present. His body seized in reaction before immediately setting to work to repair the damage. His heart stopped only long enough to realize it had been wounded before it started again with a curious-little-flutter.

The tide of blackness ebbed away as his blood pulsed around his fist clutching at the knife buried in his chest. Everything was resetting to normal. He opened his eyes to find the dim kitchen still standing and no murky-brown-stain of receding water at the edges. 

“Fuck,” he said when he pulled the knife free from his chest. There was a puddle of blood on the floor and his clothes were stained red and sticking to him. His hand was tacky when he pushed it through his hair. His knees bent without his consent and he found himself dropping into a low crouch with tears still on his face and that blunt edge of a long-forgotten loneliness.

\--

Sixty-seventy-years-ago, Malik had crawled into his bed with sweet-wet breath and fingers dusted with powdered sugar. That taste was seared into some part of Altair’s brain, whatever part sorted out the things about Malik and set them aside in a little metal box (never to be opened). 

That taste was on his tongue in the morning and in the afternoon. He brushed his teeth until they bled and still the taste-was-there.

“Are you okay?” Lena asked from the doorway of their shared bathroom.

“Bad fish for lunch,” Altair said. “I just can’t get the taste out.”

\--

The truth was this:

There was no fighting against the hold Malik held over him. There was no ignoring the biting-itch of _loneliness_ when it came. There was no pretending it did not exist; no play-acting at normality. 

But the truth was also this:

Once, very long ago now, Altair had bought his (conditional) freedom from Malik with the singular promise that he would always free Malik when he was trapped. Fifty years ago, Malik disappeared and Altair had left him out of petty spite. 

\--

In the many years of his life, Altair had walked out on more lovers than he could even begin to number. Malik delighted in hearing the stories of the heart-broken lovers he left behind. He was fond of the soft-sighing-unhappiness caught in the center of Altair’s back when the pain of leaving these now-faceless women was still fresh. Malik kissed him the most when Altair was angry-at-the-world (at his own fate, at immortality, at the women who lived such brief lives). 

Lena was stronger (by far) than Altair was. He afforded her the slight kindness of closure. He cleaned out the bank account, embezzled money from his job and took all of her jewelry when he left. It was easy-as-pie to sneak out and leave nothing but a note telling her how-sorry-he-was(n’t) and that when he made it back he’d mail her a check to cover the price of the stolen jewelry. He did not insult her by saying he loved her (but he did).

\--

It took him five and a half days to find his last-safe-house. It was dusty with disuse, filled with the odds and ends of a dozen or so half-lives lived. He set Lena’s jewels and the cash he’d taken in a tray on the top shelf. 

“I’m coming, you son of a bitch,” Altair said into the dim interior of the little safe house. He walked over to the trunk at the end of the room where he kept all of the things Malik-loved-best.


	6. Chapter 6

Altair stayed in the safe house until his body’s frantic-seizing-desire for food and drink passed. He stayed until the drowsy blandness of exhaustion passed. He kept himself awake with the quick stab of the smallest of his throwing knives against his thigh. The blood blossomed up red and then dried and left nothing but the sticky residue to remind him that there had ever been a wound. But in the spaces between each puncture and the tightening growl in his gut that had grown far too used to the practice of eating, _memories_ came to haunt him.

\--

Once, a hundred years (or so) ago, Malik had laid Altair flat out on a table. There had been an uncomfortably stiff pillow behind his head and a dingy sort of lamp light washing all across his bare skin. The air-was-cold in a way that remind Altair of the (bottom of the) ocean but Malik’s hands were hot-always-hot. One of his broad-smooth-palms was spread over Altair’s chest in a steadying-possessing touch while his ducked head, hunched shoulders, parted lips intensely concentrated on the wet-black-lines Malik was painting on his skin. 

“As far as your seduction methods go, this one mostly confuses me,” Altair bothered to say. But he was content (now). It had been a good year for them, fraught with mediocrity, devoid of the presence of other of their kind. Malik had settled from the rabid animal he sometimes was into a simple man with limited-simple-joys. They had made a life out of the dirt, built a home to share in their exile. 

“If I wanted to seduce you, I would not take so much time to do so,” Malik said. His lips curled up into a smile. 

Altair lifted his head far enough to see the odd shape of curving lines spread up-and-outward from the first black splotch on his hipbone. They had been here for a matter of hours: Altair flat on his back with his mouth moving in a babble of words he wasn’t sure he meant to share and Malik’s ghost-soft fingers and hands on his skin. The drying of the black ink left his skin feeling heated-and-tight but where it was still damp tickled-and-itched in a maddening sort of way. “What is this?”

“A work of art that attempts to be worthy of its canvas,” Malik said back. 

(One of) the only redeeming thing(s) about Malik was that he said-what-he-meant. Altair turned his head to see him better, watched the way the muscles in his arms flinched beneath his skin as he moved with precise-little-motions. The shadows at his back seemed to hug around his body like a lover’s-deep-embrace, highlighting the parts of him the light did strike his naked skin. There were little beads of sweat on his forehead, shining on his upper lip before he licked them away. His eyes were fixed-and-unblinking as he worked. “Why can’t you be like this always?” Altair said.

Malik sat back away from him. His ink-stained fingers clutched at the brush in his hand but there was no anger in his face. For the first time in a very-long-time he did not have that dark haze of hatred on his face but something far-more-vulnerable-and-far-more-human. He did not launch into a defensive tirade about the wrongs done to him and the nature of justice. These were things they had fought over before, words that had been repeated in a hundred ways even after no compromise of understanding was reached. No, Malik said, “I can feel you right now. I can’t always feel you even when you’re very close to me. Now you're the heart beating in my chest and a weight of contentment that threatens to suffocate me. It should be infuriating but I can only think—at all hours of the day—how very much I enjoy the space you take up inside of me and the way you fit so nicely next to me. And I _crave_ the sound of your voice, the touch of your skin and the delicious taste of your approval.”

“This is how we should always have been,” Altair said (softly).

Regret was not an emotion that Malik could feel. Shame did not come to him naturally but had to be carved out of his body with blood and broken bones. Altair touched the rise of his left shoulder, let his fingers skate across his heated flesh until they reached the mid-point where Malik had once sawed his own arm off. 

“It won’t last,” Malik said (just as softly). “It never lasts.”

Altair lifted himself in a coil of motion, wrapped his arm around Malik’s shoulders and dragged him up-and-down again so he was pressed all along Altair’s naked body. His arms were long-enough but not strong enough to hold Malik in place. His legs were long-enough, not strong-enough to keep him pinned _right here_ in this moment where Malik was happy to be this close. “Remember this,” Altair whispered to him between the sloppy-wet-kisses pressing back and forth between their mouths. “Long after the feeling passes, remember _this_.”

\--

When the last nagging echoes of mortal need were gone, Altair cut his hair short against his scalp and dressed himself in the white-robes of a now-lost time. It was a cheat of a compromise, something that Malik did not want (outright) but something that had never-failed to wrench loyalty out of somewhere in the center of his body. The original robes had been reduced to ribbons by years of fighting and longer years of use. These had been made in the past hundred years, stitched together in the dreary-days between the half-lives Altair had taken up living just to pass time. 

The sleeves were right to his skin, the long tips of the robes swirled around his thighs and fell nearly the full length to the floor. The red sash was a bloody-gash at his waist that the tight grip of the broad brown belt held in place.

“It is not the clothes,” Malik had told him once, “it is the man you are inside of them. That is what I cannot resist.”

That too, the memory of the man Altair had been when he found Malik-the-first-time, came sliding into place as he slipped the small throwing knives into place. He was not angry at having been torn from a life he was enjoying. He was not anxious to find-and-rescue Malik. He felt nothing but a sense of purpose that provided him a deep pool of calm.

\--

The Vault was an unmarked underground prison in the center of a vast plot of land owned and maintained by one of Abstergo Industries shell companies. It masqueraded itself as a ‘wild life reserve’ and boasted acres and acres of land left ‘untouched’ by man. The high fences and security that worked the border were purported to exist for the safety of the animals kept within and the safety of curious men who wanted the rare-and-powerful creatures kept within. 

Altair discovered it fifty years ago when the dirt was still a fresh-churned wound in the earth. He had stood within reaching distance of the entrance of the unground maze. It would not have been so difficult to find it again _now_ even with the thick growth of scrubby grass and the added peril of so many hungry predators trained to attack and kill outsiders.

Altair could manage the animals, he could solve the maze of underground corridors and he could neutralize whatever threat kept Malik safely hidden away from the world. The physical barriers are not what gave him a moment of pause in the thick-brown forest just beyond the electric fence. Somewhere under his feet, Malik was biding his time as he waited for the rescue that he had not once (in all these years) even hinted at desiring. Something had _changed_ and the unknown variable was the only dangerous aspect of the mission.

“Do you feel me now?” he said to the ground beneath his feet. “I know you’re there.” He crouched low to the ground, felt the long tails of the robe as they dragged in the underbrush. His fingers were bare against the cool ground as the hood fell forward around his face and blocked out his peripheral vision. “What are you hiding?”

\--

Assassins were easy to find. Altair could have picked a single assassin out of a crowd of a thousand men dressed in identical clothing. They all moved with the same sort of motion—regardless of the origins, regardless of their place in the overall structure. It was a bit of knowledge he had taken from Malik in the past centuries. 

( _Wherever there are Templars, there are Assassins. I made them that way. It’s in their blood._ Malik liked to say.)

There was a pair—not even a full cluster—of them stationed in the ridiculous town at the outskirts of the Vault’s property lines. They were masquerading as Newlyweds on a cross-country trip around the United States, enjoying their time exploring the wilderness. Altair found them on his third day of searching, sat in the pathetic little diner with a glass of ice water melting away in front of him and a plate of waffles-and-chicken left untouched in front of him. He’d borrowed a long black coat to cover the stark white of his odd choice in clothing.

To their credit, at least, Altair only followed them a day before they discovered him. It was the woman-not-the-man that cornered him around the side of a building as the frigid-white-air ghosted her breath like a specter in the air. “What do you want?” she demanded from him.

“Information,” Altair said.

“I don’t have any. Why don’t you try following someone else for a while?” But there was a tight little flinch at the corner of her eyes that betrayed how very much information she had. Her eyes flitted right and back again and Altair could barely contain the sigh as he turned to look at the man. He stood near the back of the alley with a gun in his hand that made him look quite a bit like a boy playacting at cops-and-robbers (or something else equally ridiculous). His glasses were frosted at the edges, his gloved hands were too thick to hold the gun properly and the fresh bit of snow that was starting to fall caught on the brilliant blue of his knitted hat. 

Malik delighted in spectacle, often threw himself directly into the path of harm to milk the horror of immortality. He enjoyed nothing so highly as he enjoyed coming back to life in front of men who knew nothing about the sort of _thing_ they really were. Altair hated being shot, despised being stabbed and, in general, preferred not to have to die at all. 

“My name is Altair Ibn-La’Ahad.”

“Bullshit,” the man said. 

“Yeah,” the woman added, “you look pretty damn good for a nine hundred year old man.”

Altair shoved the woman back, threw himself forward in a mad dash toward he man, collided with him before he never managed to pull the trigger of the gun he was so awkwardly holding and tackled him to the ground. It was a graceless motion, they knocked together with a painful clatter of limbs. The gun fell to the side and Altair grabbed it and stood up again. 

“Shaun!” the woman shouted. She was scuttling across the dirty space between the buildings, her red coat and dark hair peppered with the falling snow. Her urgency was unhindered by concern for her own life as she caught Shaun’s face in her hands and turned him to look at her. The proactive curl of her body across his body was an easy weakness to exploit. Altair considered it for the briefest of seconds before he stuck a hand inside of the black coat he wore and pulled a knife free. “What are you going to do?” the woman hissed at him.

“My name is Altair Ibn-La’Ahad,” he said again, “I am one half of two. I have lived longer than your history books can recall.” He cut into the hard flesh of bone at the base of his left ring finger and let the amputated digit fall to the ground. Blood flowed easily from the wound for a matter of seconds. The far-and-distant pain from the wound ceased almost immediately as his body channeled all of its focus into recovering. The new finger started as a ghost of little white fibers, a bit of bone with pink at the center that grew-and-grew. Every centimeter it stretched away from his palm stretched the existing flesh with it until it was only the fingernail at the end left to be regrown. 

They were still there, crouching-on, laying-on the cold ground staring at him with obscene-wet-horror.

“My other half is being held prisoner by the Templars. You will tell me everything you know about the Vault.” He let his hand fall to his side but did not tuck the knife away.

“You're dead,” Shaun said. He got back to his feet with a drunken-kind-of-lurch. “Ezio found your skeleton in a _library_. Abstergo verified it as you with DNA testing. You are dead.”

“I cannot die. Removing my bones was tedious but hardly lethal,” Altair said. Malik had cut him to pieces, again and again, removing each bone precisely so as to keep them intact and unmarred. It had taken them months of time and effort—especially his spine and his skull. (Malik’s face twisted in grim hatred with the words, _I hated being beheaded_ as good as an apology as he’d ever managed.) “Tell me everything you know about the Vault.”

“Fine,” the woman (not the man) said. She looked toward the end of the alley. “Not here. You’re not the first person to come after us.”

\--

The two of them had rented a house at the end of an unpaved road that backed up to the woods that fed into the larger forest that covered the perimeter of the vault. The man did not stop staring at Altair with the utmost concentration—especially after Altair removed the black coat and stood in the muggy-heat of their tiny living room. 

It was the woman that worked with quick-efficiency and bitter hatred. She pulled out a computer and clicked at the keys until the information she was willing to give him was spread across its glossy screen. “The Vault is, as far as we can tell, Abstergo’s version of a maximum security prison. It supposedly has fifty one prisoners spread out through a series of halls that look almost exactly like a sheet of graph paper. There’s no lights except at the intersections of the hallways that are exactly the same length and width on every level of the beast. The prisoners are kept in individual boxes separated in such a way that they cannot communicate with one another. There is only one exit or entrance that is located in the center of the top level where the dozen or so Abstergo employees sleep, eat and do whatever else you do in an underground torture prison.”

“When they do not get what they want from the prisoners, they simply leave them in their boxes until they die,” Shaun said.

Altair looked at the schematic of the building—no stairs but ramps built into the precisely identical hallways. The bottom level was a blank space that seemed to be included in the plans only because it appeared to exist. “Who is in there?”

“Anyone that poses a series threat to Abstergo’s goal of world domination—mostly Assassins, some politicians.” The woman was saying. 

“In the past three weeks—who is new?” Altair said.

The man turned a second computer around to face him. The face on the screen was so very close to his own that it was almost as if looking into a mirror. The difference was solely the mortal glow in this other man’s face. “Desmond Miles,” Shaun said. “I’d wager from the striking similarities you share that he is, perhaps, a descendent of yours? We thought they were using him to find one of the Pieces of Eden—he’s a descendent of Ezio Auditore—but he was abruptly moved _here_ to the Vault and we haven’t figured out why.”

Oh-that-son-of-a-bitch. Altair’s fists were tight enough to make the leather of his gloves creak in time with the tight pinch of his jaw and the painful rigidity in his spine. Malik-was-fucking the kid (no doubt-at-all). “It does not matter why. They will all be dead as soon as Malik is finished toying with them.”

“We need Desmond,” the woman said.

Altair frowned at her. “Should I tell you about the man they have brought him to entertain? Would you like to know of the other stupid boys he has played this game with in the many years of our lives? Desmond is little more than a pawn in a game he cannot even begin to comprehend. His sole chance at survival hinges on the goodwill of a monster. The moment he ceases to amuse Malik, he will die.”

“We need Desmond alive,” Shaun said from the side. “There has to be some way of improving his odds at survival.”

“Hope that he is smart enough to adapt to Malik’s changing moods,” Altair said. Because there was nothing else in the world that could save him. Even if Altair found the door of the Vault _right now_ and even if he picked his way through the endless lay of tunnels _right now_ , Desmond’s life had already been given to Malik; there simply was no taking it back.


	7. Chapter 7

It should have been easy to fall asleep. Desmond hadn’t been well-fed in weeks (maybe months). His body was in a stupor. Under his hand, his belly felt tight and full in a complete welcome way. Every part of his body was heavy with the need for sleep but the persistent worry between his ears and the thrumming-drumming-of his heart wouldn’t relent. So he laid in the dark, stuck with thoughts he could not control, listening to the scatter of little black bugs creeping-crawling in the little foam and cardboard containers next to the thin pallet he called a bed. The smell of his bathroom bucket was dimmed only by the virtue of the large brown bag they’d allowed him to keep when they brought the food to him. 

“Are you listening to me in here?” he said to the blackness over his head. His eyes were closed because he could not see anything even with them open, and perhaps because he was trying to trick his brain into giving in and letting his body sleep. “Did you enjoy the free porn show? I guess you did.” He tipped his head toward the empty cartons. “Stay tuned,” he mumbled, “bet there’s going to be more of the same tomorrow.”

The thought should have made him furious. It should have sparked something like a fire somewhere inside of his body and the best he could manage was a lukewarm distaste like a burning kind of tear in the corner of his eye. 

Malik said: you have to choose a master, Desmond.  
Lucy said: we reward results, Desmond.  
William-his-father said: smart boys stay alive.

\--

Morning came, eventually. Desmond woke up with the sound of the door opening (which meant at some point he must have slept) and Lucy was standing there with a brilliant-white-smile on her evil-little-face. There was a thermos of milk and a sack of breakfast sandwiches to reward him for all of his hard work. 

“Is that because I earned it or because _he_ isn’t attracted to emaciated prisoners?” Desmond said. He sat up in the scant light the open door offered and swiped away the bugs that had taken up residence on the bed next to his face. A shiver of some long-lost disgust worked through his shoulders before it dissipated again. 

“Does it matter? According to the intelligence we gathered on you prior to your initial capture, this,” she shook the bag, “was your favorite breakfast.” She did not hand it to him but wait until he had his ratty old shoes on over his thinned-gray socks. 

He stood with a languid stretch that did nothing at all to ease the tension in his body. 

“Eat while you walk,” Lucy said. She shoved the bag against his chest and turned toward the blinking-blinking light at the end of the hallway. It wasn’t the same way that took them to the briefing room. “It has been decided that there is nothing you can read that will take the place of your apparent ‘natural’ ability to make people like you.”

“Yeah well, sucking someone’s dick does wonders like that.”

Lucy stopped in the pool of dim light to roll her eyes at his theatrics. “As I recall, he called you tedious, Desmond. I wouldn’t put too much stock in your sexual prowess.”

Desmond had never wanted to kill anyone. It was a foreign feeling in his chest that ran down his arms like tightening ribbons until it was all he could do to grind his teeth and stare at this-thing that was-but-wasn’t the same woman he remembered from those (now lost) days back in the much-nicer Abstergo prison. Lucy had been something-like a friend (not quite, but not exactly _not_ ) and how she was smiling at him and the way his fingers were ripping the bag hanging from his fist. “It’s kind of the only thing keeping me alive right now, isn’t it?” he said.

“All the more reason to be realistic about it.” She turned and started walking again, the white blur of her body passing like a ghost through the black space between the lights. Desmond took a moment to breathe-in, breath-out before he could even force his feet to move. 

\--

Lucy stopped in the moat, six-steps from Malik’s door with a sharp turn on her heels. “We want his soul mate,” she said. “Do whatever you have to.”

“How does this end, Lucy?” Desmond asked. “You’re not going to let me leave. Not after the things I’ve found out—not when you know where I came from, who my father is.”

“You have seen our nicer facilities, Desmond. You’re not useless. As I’ve said we like to reward results. If you get us what we want here, there’s no reason not to believe you could have the same effect on some of other troublesome areas.”

“I am _not_ your whore,” Desmond hissed at her.

“You asked me how this ends. The answer is that it doesn’t. Your best chance at survival, at having a life somewhat worth living, is cooperation. Find out who the monster’s soul mate is.” Then she motioned him forward toward the door and stayed with her fingers just over the control while he seethed in impotent rage that stilled his feet and stalled in his chest. “Don’t be childish, Desmond.”

\--

It was sixty-seconds (tops) between the first footstep forward and the door sliding shut behind him, locking him in with Malik. Sixty-seconds-tops that went like this:

Don’t-be-childish Desmond, don’t be _child_ ish. Do not be such a _child_ Desmond. Like his father-had-said when he was short and chubby and whining about chores and pull-ups. Don’t be-such-a-baby, sometimes but always (always, always, always) don’t be _such a_ child. Because that’s what men-and-women with power liked to say to anyone that didn’t _fall_ in _line_. Don’t-be-a-child. Don’t-disobey. Don’t fight-back. Do-what-you’re-told. Because it _worked_. Because it was like something wiggling-and-squirming set inside of the anger. Invalidate-and-belittle-and-dominate. But Lucy-was-standing there with a grim-smile and a gun at her belt. There was no-fighting-back that didn’t end with holes in the center of his forehead and wouldn’t that be almost-a-relief? Death-was-simple, Death-was-easy. Fuck-everything, after this Death was a fucking vacation from the _truth_. And Malik was waiting-just-waiting for him (wasn’t he) with his smug-little-face and his older-than-dirt mentality saying things like:

_you have to choose a master, Desmond_

Because little boys like Desmond who were _childish_ could not fight-back-themselves. It was give-up and give-in and do what he was told (just like a _good boy_ right?) or give it up to a murdering madman. It wasn’t survival because he was _dead_ no matter what he did and it was never more obvious than when Lucy’s pinked-tip white fingers brushed over the gun at her side as her stance shifted because ‘don’t be childish, Desmond’ and he still hadn’t moved his fucking feet.

No, this wasn’t about _staying alive_. He was fucked-and-better-off-dead. It was about dragging-them-down-with-him and it was funny how it wasn’t funny when his feet started moving. It was funny how it wasn’t funny at all, something steel in his chest that slid into place and knocked a smile up onto his face. His body moved with all the fluid-fucking-grace his father had spent years trying to force into him, all of that grace-of-motion that had been knocking around his head since Lucy shoved him full of Ezio’s memories. 

He wasn’t Desmond-the-childish-and-scared but Desmond the God-damned Assassin grinning right back into Lucy’s fucking-face because he wasn’t _scared_ of her. Not then, not ever, not even with the bruises she left on his face still a present sting with the rise of his grin. He wanted-to-say (but didn’t, not yet, not ever) you-are-going-to-die because the monster in the basement didn’t like people touching his fucking toys.

\--

The door slid shut and Malik was right there, right against his body with a curious tilt of his head and a possessive grip of a hand on his neck. It made perfect sense (right there, in just that moment) because Desmond was grabbing Malik by the face and dragging him the last-few-inches to mash their mouths together. 

Step-step-step and his back was flat against a wall with Malik’s hands under his shirt and the strange nothing-taste of his tongue filling up Desmond’s mouth. Malik’s skin was hot (not cool) and his touch was urgent-not-painful. His bare chest was rough with hair and broad like a fucking door. There was so much power in the muscles Desmond found himself kneading at as he spread his legs like he _wanted_ it and gave Malik the room to grind forward against his hip. 

“I want them dead,” Desmond gasped into Malik’s mouth.

Malik’s groan was pitiful but the sharp thrust of his hips knocked Desmond’s whole body against the wall. His two hands were shoving his pants down and shame-made Desmond’s breath catch and stutter even before Malik wiggled out of his own pants. The hand at the back of his neck dragged him back into the blood-tinged-kiss and it was a welcome-distraction from the damp-tipped-slide of a dick against his skin. 

Then Malik was biting at his throat, hard enough to make him yelp in surprise-and-pain. Hard enough to leave a wet-heated-pain behind. He slapped Malik’s arms and yanked at his hair as he arched to get away but Malik had one arm around his neck and one hand at his hip and would not be shaken loose.

“Stop,” Desmond said.

“Shut up, Desmond,” Malik said sharply. “Do better than yesterday.” 

There wasn’t enough room in his brain to sort out the command before Malik was kissing him again, perfectly-possessive. Desmond bit back at his lips and his tongue with an edge of anger that did nothing to improve his chances at survival. There was blood on Malik’s mouth when he pulled back with a dirty-filthy grin. His voice like a low-lofty-whimper when he said, “ _Pant_.”

“Suck my dick,” Desmond whispered back.

Malik licked the words right out of his mouth, pinked-with-delight before he dropped down to his bare knees on the cold floor of his prison cell. His mouth was hot-as-fire and twice as efficient as it had been only yesterday. Desmond panted and choked on his breath and doubled over with two hands on Malik’s shoulders as he came.

There was a white moment of pause, a disco ordinated motion as his limbs were put back into some kind of logical order. He was limp-as-a-doll with Malik’s body moving over his. There was a heated-fog of breath in his ear saying, “tell me how they should die.”

The slippery-wet sounds of Malik’s fist on his own dick was an underscore to the demand. Desmond turned his head to look at him, watched the reddening blush of blood just under his skin as he started thrusting into the tight grip of his own fist. It was so stupidly human, that blush and that eager jut of hips. Something that seemed out of place on an immortal thing like Malik. But Desmond’s fingers were tracing the raised ridge of the scar over Malik’s heart as his tongue wiped the sweat away from his lips. 

“I want them to die slowly, I want them to die terrified. I want them to choke to death on their own blood and know it was me.”

Then Malik was kissing him again, one hand grabbing his jaw in a vice-like grip. The wet splatter of come across Desmond’s skin was a shocking-heat. But it was nothing to the way Malik shivered over him before ducking down to lap at the white streaks. 

\--

After, Desmond pulled his pants back on but left his shirt off. His breakfast was cold—stiff, tasteless and greasy in his mouth as he ate. Every motion of his jaw made the bites on his neck pull and sting which seemed to make Malik’s self satisfied grin grow even wider. “They want your soul mate,” Desmond said.

“I suppose it was only a matter of time. The Templars were unhappy to discover that I created them. It does not sit well with their view of history—there was no great mortal that stood against the plague of immortals. No great visionary that set them on this path but only me.”

“What did the Assassins do to piss you off?” Desmond asked. He licked the grease off his fingers and peeled the gummy bread off the sausage and cheese part of the sandwich. “I mean, you created the Templars to defeat the Assassins, didn’t you?”

“I created the Templars to give the Assassins a purpose. Otherwise I would have had to kill them all. By the time they tried to kill me, Assassins had already spread. It would have been an annoyance to try to stamp out,” Malik said. 

“Is there anyone you know that hasn’t tried to kill you?” Desmond asked.

“You,” Malik said. Then he waved the thought away. “If you were capable of the attempt I imagine you would try. Should we talk about what I want from you today?”

Desmond stuffed the bread and the wrappers from the sandwiches back into the bag. “You already got something from me today.” The thermos of milk had gone room-warm but it was still something to drink to get the cold grease taste out of his mouth. 

“I got something from you but I did not ask for it. It is strange that you were so careless today when you want such a valuable piece of information from me.” He rolled forward on his knees and crawled forward across the space between them. “Did you sleep last night, Desmond? Did your offended sexuality keep you awake? Did you lay on your filthy bed and reassure yourself that you’re still a _man_?” The contempt dripping off the word was nothing compared to flicker of realization in Malik’s face at discovering the truth. “Yet,” he said, “you caved so easily today. What has dear Lucy offered you that is worth more than your fragile sense of masculinity?”

Desmond leaned forward the last precious few inches between them so that his rough cheek was against Malik’s smoother one. “I want a shower, Malik. Wouldn’t you rather fuck someone that doesn’t smell?” It wasn’t what he meant to say. He meant to ask if they were still play-acting at contempt. When he slid backward again, he smiled into Malik’s narrowed eyes. “It should count,” Desmond said firmly.

“This is not a child’s playground. I did not ask.” Then Malik sat back again, crossed his legs in front of himself and drew a breath in through his nose. There was a wrinkle of displeasure as he did it before he said, “the information you want from me is worth more than a subpar orgasm I was able to get from your mouth.”

“You’re not getting anything else from me.”

“Do not worry about _that_ Desmond. Even if I were in the mood for it, the smell of your body is enough to ward off even the least scrupulous of men. I will tell you the name of my soul mate and the approximate location of him at the end of six days if you give me exactly what I ask of you—not once, but each time I ask you for as long as you are in this room with me.” 

“That’s not fair,” Desmond said again. “You can ask for anything and if I don’t give it to you I have to deal with _them_.”

“You just asked me to give you the instrument of my own death. Why should I give it easily? What has Abstergo promised you in exchange for this? It couldn’t be freedom? What is worth the price I name if it is not freedom, Desmond?”

“They are going to let me go,” Desmond said. Bold-as-he-could with the quiver of the lie it really was caught in the end of the word. 

“Liar,” Malik said. “Agree or don’t but do not waste your lies on me.”

It was impossible—absolutely impossible to figure out if Malik was playing along with the game Desmond thought they were trying to play or if he was simply enjoying the power he held. There was no air of companionable deception about him (but was there ever) only the arrogance of a superior thing. “Fine, I agree.”

“Let me hit you, Desmond.”

Desmond got to his feet and Malik got to his. There was an insufferable smirk on his face as he motioned a little circle with his finger. Desmond gritted his teeth as he turned around and flinched at the touch of Malik’s hands pushing him toward the wall. Two hands were around his wrists to put his hands against the wall. His fingers trailed fluttery-and-soft down his arms and his back. “Really?” Desmond said to the hand that stopped just above the ruffled elastic waistband of his pants. “This is what gets you off?”

“No,” Malik said. His voice was purposefully loud and clear when he spoke. The strike of his hand against Desmond’s flank echo around the room. It bounced back at him like it should have burned from embarrassment and pain but the actual impact left little more than a warm mark in its wake. “This is for their amusement. How many men do you suppose they gave me to kill simply because they were finished with them? How many do you think were given to me to torture on their behalf? How many favors have I done for them in my captivity?”

“Are you serious?” Desmond hissed back at him. He turned his head to look at Malik and nearly bit his own tongue when he was slapped again. The flat-heat of the strike was like something stabbing through his chest and he ducked his head between his spread arms and breathed spit-wet air through his clenched teeth as he thought viciously-about-their-deaths.

“Nothing to say?” Malik said.

“Who is your soul mate?” Desmond said.

\--

Malik got tired of maintain the act of hitting him, maybe. He didn’t announce he was finished but simply walked away and lounged on his mountain of pillows. With his arms behind his head he looked disturbingly human—almost approachable. He was looking at the map drawn across the ceiling of the room, barely visible in the low light. 

Desmond sulked for a while. He finished drinking his milk and then kicked off his socks and shoes and padded over to lay next to Malik. He’d thrown his lot in with the murderer, there was no reason to maintain a safe distance anymore. He laid on his side with his arm under his face and kept his voice low-and-small so it wouldn’t be heard. “Why hasn’t he come for you?”

The noise Malik made was as much a growl as it was a sigh. He cleared his throat but did not turn away from looking at the map over his head. “Sixty two years ago, Altair was married to a woman named Harriet. They were desperately in love with one another—he does that, finds women to fall in love with—they had two children. I found them. She was a homely woman—not at all the sort that he usually falls for. The children were very young at the time. The boy was six or so and the girl was barely walking.”

“Did you kill them?” Desmond whispered.

Malik looked at him then. “You mortals are so concerned with the young. I killed Harriet in front of her children. She begged for their lives with her last breath. Altair found me after—he had been away at work. I had his children sitting in their beds with the drying blood of their mother flaking off their feet. The boy was so frightened he wet himself and the girl child had not stopped crying in hours. He said, you’ve ruined them. He said, why didn’t you just kill them? And I told him that their mother begged me for their lives.”

“Did he kill them?” Desmond asked.

“No, I killed them later. It was one of the last things I did before Abstergo collected me. They were grown when I found them—the boy remembered me but the girl did not. Altair knows that I did, he keeps better track of his offspring than I do.”

“Just not close enough track to keep you from killing them.”

Malik did not smile at the words but let out a soft sigh. “I thought, perhaps, he had sent you to me because he was coming. That is not the truth. Or it was not the truth. He will come now.” Then Malik rolled onto his side and looked down at him. “I have been very kind to you, Desmond. The next time I ask, it will not be a ruse.”

“I know,” Desmond said. 

“Sleep,” Malik said loud-and-sure. “You are pathetic to look at. What good are you when you can barely keep your head up?”

\--

But the inevitable came, hours later when Desmond woke up with a dizzy sense of disorientation. There was fresh food on the table for him to eat and a discreet little bucket in the corner to accommodate his needs. 

Malik was sprawled in a chair with his face like stone. “Crawl to me,” he said. “It’s time to see if sleep has improved your skill level.” And Desmond crept across the floor on his hands-and-knees until he was kneeling between the careless part of Malik’s knees. 

“I think you’re asking for a miracle,” Desmond said. He caught the elastic waistband of Malik’s pants and tugged them down until they were caught at his thighs. The tight flutter of panic in his chest did nothing to lend bravery to his face when he looked at Malik. The man just grinned at him with a raised eyebrow before he motioned at his already hardening dick. “I just need a minute,” he said. He wasn’t sure if it was acting-or-real but the hand that caught the back of his head and shoved him down face-first was real-enough. 

“Try to take a shower, Desmond,” Malik said to the air above him. “I want something better from you tomorrow.” The weight of his dick in Desmond’s mouth and the unwelcome stretch of it at his lips drowned out the words to misshapen blurs of sound that cut into breathy pants. 

\--

Lucy was there at the end of the day. There was no pride or disgust on her face but a carefully painted neutrality. She held out a bottle of soda in a manner that was neither ashamed nor repentant but purely factual. 

“Hammond will bring you dinner when it’s ready.” She marched him out of the blinding light of the moat and back into the forgiving dimness of the hallways. “As for a shower, it shouldn’t be a problem but it’s probably best to wait until the morning.”

“Probably,” he said all hoarse-and-hollow. (But in his head, where she couldn’t see, all he could think was _you-are-going-to-_ die.)


	8. Chapter 8

That night all of his lullabies were blood-soaked visions of murder. 

\--

“Assassins stand for something,” his father said to him when they were about-the-same-height. Desmond didn’t remember much in such perfect clarity as the moment he realized his father was just a _man_ and it started right at that moment. Right there in the little side shed with a thousand little slips of scrap paper stuck here-and-there in piles. His father’s hands were immense, fingers threaded through fingers, resting in the space between them. 

It started as a pondering kind of thought about whether or not his father had ever killed anyone or if he were just a madman by nature. The sort of thought that Desmond had spent the whole of his life being trained right out of having. But they came still, that whistling little doubt about whether his father had lost his mind. 

Desmond said, “what? What do they stand for? Because I can’t figure it out.”

William was disappointed but patient. William said, “we stand for freedom, Desmond.”

“This isn’t free.” Because it _wasn’t_ free. Nothing had ever happened in his life that hadn’t been orchestrated by his father. This was the only oppression he had ever seen with his own eyes and the only tyrant that he had ever stood face-to-face with was the man who sat across the desk from him. 

“I admit it’s a contradiction.” (I admit, I have no idea what I’m doing. I admit, I am only following along after the one that came before me. I admit—) “But this is important, Desmond. This is what you were born to do. It’s in your blood.”

Desmond grit his teeth and turned his face. Six-seven weeks later he was escaping over the wall with nothing but the clothes on his back and a meager ration of food he’d thought to bring along. 

\--

Morning might have come but there was no sunlight underground. There was a sliver of yellow-strained-light sliding through the cracks in the swinging plate at the bottom of his door. Desmond touched it with his fingertips when he was murky-and-half-asleep. It felt like a profound thing, that slant of light across his fingertips, but it felt ridiculous in equal measures.

\--

Lucy came with pancakes, eggs and syrup that she gave to him in a plastic Tupperware dish and motioned him up and out of his tiny little room. The pancakes were thin and tasteless and the syrup was sugar-free and disgusting but it was _hot_ food that slid down his throat. There was hot coffee and cold milk to drink as they walked through the sloping hallways (felt like up but what did he know anymore) until they reached a square room barely larger than the briefing room. The far wall was lined with rusted shower heads set over molding blue tiles. The vent in the ceiling was churning out more piss-warm air with a side dish of muggy-black-dust. There was a metal grate in the floor that was green and fuzzy. 

“Don’t take a lot of showers here, huh?” he said.

“Most of the prisoners that are kept here,” she shook her head. “They don’t make it long. They come in screaming vengeance and they go mad in little black holes in the wall as they starve to death.”

“That why Vidic put me here?” Desmond asked. He licked the little plastic fork clean and set it down on the ground (there was nowhere else to set it). “That’s the thing I can’t figure out, you know. Why the hell did he—or you—think I stood a chance with Malik?”

Because yesterday Lucy told him to find Malik’s soul mate and days ago she told him he had a fifty-percent-chance of survival. If they-didn’t-know that Altair-was-Malik’s soul mate there was no reason to think that Desmond stood a fucking five-percent-chance much less fifty. 

He pulled his ratty shirt off while she shifted on her feet and noticeably did not linger on the sight of the livid-red marks Malik had left with his teeth. They were raised and sore across his throat, nipped into the flesh of his shoulders and faint outlines of too-hard grips at his waist. He stopped long enough to take a swallow of hot-black-coffee (terrible stuff) before he set that thermos on the floor and shimmied out of his pants. “What was it you said? You were sentimental to think he’d spare me?”

Lucy thrust a plastic bag of travel-sized soap and shampoo at him. Her jaw opened like she had to snap a lock to force it to move. “I thought it was obvious by now, Desmond. Malik’s preoccupation with Ezio was an aberration in his normal pattern. When he resurfaced and forced the Templars to get directly involved with the Auditores, we took note of it. When he followed Ezio through Italy, we took note of it. There was something about Ezio that intrigued him, something that we cannot explain. That comment he made about his soul mate’s descendants is perhaps the first major piece of information we have about his motivation. Ezio is one of your ancestors, you look very similar to him in the face. There was enough reason to think that he would respond favorably. It’s one of the reasons we had you in the Animus. The bleeding effect makes you move in a way similar to Ezio.” ( _Liar_.)

“So none of this happens if I’d looked different?”

“Or if you were a girl,” Lucy said. “Take a shower, Desmond. I’ve got an electric razor you can use for your face after you’re done.”

“You don’t want me looking scruffy for my hot date?” Desmond took his little plastic bag of soap and went to the least rusted showerhead. The knob to turn it on was rusted so badly it was nearly immovable. What little it did move let out a sorry dribble of cold water. It was enough to get wet in and enough to rinse off with but not nearly enough to make him feel anything at all but filthy in a way that couldn’t be washed clean. 

Lucy produced a towel and a razor by the time he’d finished. There was no mirror so he stood shivering in front of her while she critiqued his skills at shaving his own face. “I doubt you care at this point, Desmond, but this isn’t what I thought would happen.”

“What, you thought he’d just kill me and be done with it?” Desmond said. He pulled a fresh pair of prisoner slacks on and a T-shirt (a happy addition to his wardrobe) with a new long sleeve shirt over it. 

“Yes,” Lucy said. “That’s why Vidic agreed. You were supposed to die anyway, so why not throw you at one of our biggest enemies and hope for the best?” Then she took the razor from him and left it in the plastic bag on the floor with his old clothes. 

\--

The hallways were rough under his bare feet. Desmond kept time with Lucy’s long strides as they passed through the short black hallways toward the aggravating puddle of light where the overhead bulbs flickered on-off-on-off. 

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six flickers to ten of Lucy’s quick-steps. The rhythm was a lull in his head taking the place of the dread over the dreary reality that waited for him at the bottom of this hell hole. 

\--

The door opened, Desmond walked through.

Malik was sitting on his cushions with his eyes closed and his hands in his lap. It could have been meditating if Desmond could really bring himself to think Malik was capable of such a thing. It seemed like something that could so easily commit the acts of heartless murder that Malik did couldn’t find enough inner peace to meditate. It seemed like whatever space inside of him where a conscience was supposed to be would filled with hateful fire. 

And yet, he seemed so peaceful sitting there.

“I’m here,” Desmond said.

Malik’s eyes opened with a quick flick. “Also clean.” 

“Yeah, so why don’t we just get this over with?” Waiting-for-it was worse-than-doing it. It was a universal truth that every child in the world knew. One of the very first things that Desmond could remember learning. 

“Patience, Desmond. All in good time.” Malik got to his feet and crossed the floor to where Desmond was standing. His hands were smooth (always soft) when they touched his fresh-shaved face. His grip was rough when he pulled Desmond down to kiss him. It was hardly more than an awkward meeting of mouths and then gone again. “Why don’t you ask me a question while we wait?”

“Did you fuck Ezio?” It was a jealous-lover’s question with the way Malik was close enough to curl a hand around his waist. Their faces were centimeters apart, every single one of Malik’s black-as-night eyelashes were in perfect focus as Desmond looked at him. Even the tone of his voice was an accusation, something that fit poorly against the crawl of unhappy acquiesce as he allowed the murderer to touch him however he wanted. 

“Yes. Just once. Not exactly the same way I intend to fuck you. You see, Ezio did not know who I was and it was important that he not figure it out. By then, immortality and soul mates were the stuff of children’s stories. We were no longer a fact—peril of the rising population of mortals. Even among the Assassins we were thought of as mostly a metaphor.” A grin quirked at Malik’s lips. His hand pulled away from Desmond. “Also, he thought I was a woman.”

“A woman,” Desmond repeated. There was nothing remotely feminine about Malik. The set of his jaw alone was far more masculine that even a goodly amount of alcohol could diminish. His shoulders were flat and broad, his arms were thick with muscle and there was a constant black shadow on his cheeks where hair seemed to threaten-to but never-actually-grew. 

“Yes. Ezio was a remarkable fighter, he possessed perhaps the most impressive stamina of any mortal I have ever watched and the strongest constitution of any mortal of his age. But he was stupid about some things—intentionally at times and unintentionally at others.”

“But a woman,” Desmond repeated.

Malik rolled his eyes. “Maybe it would ease your disbelief to know he was also moderately in love with his friend Leonardo. Not as greatly as he was in love with all of the women in Italy, but well enough.” He was leaning closer now, inspecting the marks he’d left the day before with a happy hum of approval at what he found. 

Desmond put an arm around his ribs and tipped his face so their cheeks were pressed together. “Lucy knows about Altair,” he whispered. 

“Knowing will not save her,” Malik said. “Perhaps it will allow her some closure to know the name of her executioner when he comes.” Then he was dragging his tongue around the outline of the marks his teeth left with that same humming approval. 

“No,” Desmond said. “Say what you want or I don’t have to let you touch me.”

“Push-ups,” Malik said. “That is what I want from you.”

“How many?”

“Until I tell you to stop—take your shirt off.” Then Malik was walking away from him, settled at the table with that plate of dates still sitting there. “Now, Desmond.”

It wasn’t the worst (wasn’t the best) thing he’d ever been asked to do. Desmond pulled his shirts off and threw them over the back of the empty chair. His skin tingled at the chill in the room and the faded dread of what-was-still to come. But this he could do, push-ups were a habit William gave him that he couldn’t seem to get rid of. It was an easy rhythm to fall into, a nice dull spot to concentrate on.

\--

“Stop,” Malik said. The wooden chair scraped across the floor and his feet padded over to where Desmond gratefully collapsed forward against the cold-concrete ground. The shaking weakness in his arms had gone far and beyond the burn of overworked muscles and gone straight into something far more unpleasant. He was coated in sweat, face and hair slicked with it. Grit clung to his chest and he couldn’t even bring himself to care. Malik stepped across his thighs and dropped down to his knees as his hands pressed hard against the small of Desmond’s back and slipped slick-and-quick up to his shoulders. His hips slid forward, pressed against Desmond’s ass with only the thin-worn-cotton pants to separate them. 

Malik’s chest was rough and hairy against his back, his fingers soft as they cradled his chin and pulled Desmond’s face back up. His voice was a quiet-black-whisper in his ear. “Very good, Desmond.” 

The rock of his body against Desmond’s made his hands clench up into fists that he was physically incapable of maintaining. His muscles gave and he was powerless. “This the plan all along? I can’t fight back so you get whatever you want?”

“Would you have fought back even if you could?” Malik asked. It was a curious little sound as his mouth sucked at the sweat on Desmond’s neck. His fingers tasted like dirt and old ink when one-two of them pressed over Desmond’s lips and in against his tongue. 

He jerked away from the invading digits and Malik used that momentum to roll him on his back. “I don’t know,” Desmond said. “Say what you want.”

“I am going to fuck you,” Malik said. 

“Not like this,” Desmond said. He didn’t have the energy to roll over but he didn’t want to see the bastard when he did it either. It was enough that it was going to happen. It was enough to know that he was trading this momentary physical thing for the deaths of the people he hated more than Malik. He didn’t want to have to watch Malik as he did it. 

Malik’s answer was a kiss—not the rough rubbing maul of yesterday’s kiss. It wasn’t the blank-smacking of their mouths as it had been earlier that morning. It was an invasive sort of thing, a kiss meant for a different man. Malik held onto him with two hands and kissed him with such sweet-precision. Desmond’s arms were around his shoulders, his fingers were threading through his thick-dark hair because it was the sort of kiss you shared with a lover. He was good-at-playing-along (now). 

“This is what I want,” Malik said into his pinked lips. “What do you want in exchange?”

“In exchange for what?” Desmond asked but the answer was, “in exchange for fucking me like this? For making me watch?” Malik nodded, the splay of his hands slipped in the gritty sweat of Desmond’s chest as he traced the lines of his still-quivering body. There were ears over their heads listening to every-fucking-sound and he thought-he-could live with that because they were the ears-of-dead men but it crashed around him in that moment. 

They were _listening_ , recording every-single-sound, congratulating themselves on a job-well-done. And Malik was looking at him, wanted to look at him—wanted to watch him—and Desmond had zero fucking choices because it wasn’t like Lucy-and-Malik wouldn’t find something _worse_ to do to him. 

(At least, he told the dizzying cyclone of _things_ banging around inside of skull, at least-at _least_ Malik didn’t want to _hurt_ him. At least-that-at-least.)

“Tell me why,” Desmond said. “Why do you have to do this at all?”

Malik bared his teeth at the question, settled back on his knees for a moment. His hands lifted away from Desmond like he’d finally struck a nerve in the impenetrable armor Malik kept around himself. But he came back, all slither and snake-like. The voice in his ear said, “I am broken. What the others had—the ability to feel and call for their mates—it does not come to me naturally. You make me miss him and it has been enough to bring him close but he will not come if he can still resist.”

“What?” Desmond said. 

Malik lifted away just enough to look at his face. “I has not escaped your attention that I am devoid of the emotions that plague you. I have been called many names—monster, fiend, devil—and they are apt and accurate. I cannot force him to come to me if I do not miss him. I cannot miss him if I cannot feel.”

“So I’m your damn telephone?” Desmond said. He expected something (less?) more elaborate from Malik. Some interweaving layers of derision and condescension about how Desmond’s mortal sense of heterosexuality (or even the nagging notion of not wanting to be coerced) was a waste of his energy. (Or maybe something simpler, maybe ‘Just-because-I-can.’)

“That is not entirely accurate. I am the telephone, you are the operator that will connect the call.” Malik was sitting back again. His voice was loud-enough to be heard-and-recorded. The bastards upstairs must have been scratching their heads over the extended analogy (or just disregarding it). “Does this satisfy you?”

“No. Why are you broken?” Desmond got on his elbows even as Malik’s lazy fingers were slipping under the waistband of his pants. “You said that you loved Kan. If that’s true you were capable of love once. And you’re a fucking immortal with a _soul mate_. One of the people that scared the Gods so badly they had to rip you in half.”

“You are an insolent thing,” Malik said. “Is this fearlessness borne out of stupidity or the knowledge you have nothing to lose? Stupidity is understandable. It would not be your fault that you were born simple. But this misconception you have that there is nothing else I can take from you—that is a mistake that must be corrected.” Malik surged forward, moved so fast that Desmond could escape him save for knocking his own head to the floor with a sound thud of skull-on-concrete. “I have survived every torture known to man, Desmond. Do not speak to me with such contempt again.” Then, softly-and-sweetly, “apologize to me.”

“I’m not sorry,” Desmond said. “You asked what I wanted and I told you I want to know why.”

Malik punched him in the side so fast and precisely that the pain of it knocked all of the breath out of his body and left him gasping at air and grabbing at Malik’s arms. His fingers were useless as wet noodles against Malik and his voice was a repeating hollowed-gulping noise with no success at dragging air into his lungs. His body was arched and shaking as Malik’s hands slid across his ribs like he was searching for which one he wanted to break. “Would you like to know how I killed so many of them, Desmond?”

Desmond nodded out of instinct not interest. 

“They can’t help but find one another, Desmond. They are powerless to fight it. All of them came like little mindless things, chasing across the world to find their mate. I only needed to find one of two and wait. They cannot survive alone, do you understand this? They _must_ find one another. I did not even have to kill both; I only needed to kill one and the other would die of shock and grief. I have watched them thousands of years. I have seen how inevitable it is. They cannot part once they’ve found one another. They cannot stand the loneliness. This is what I cannot feel. Where the contentment of knowing my mate should be, there is an endless nothing.”

“Then how does fucking me help?” Desmond said.

“I can’t remember the feeling,” Malik said. It was a confession, a wound laid bare for inspection. “But I can remember that I had it once. I remember it the way I remember his body against mine and the sound of his voice. It’s what he trained me to remember. If I can remember the feeling, he will have to come. He will not be able to stand it.”

“When he gets here, is he going to kill me?” Desmond asked. (Funny how he hadn’t even considered that.)

Malik shrugged. “No. He does not take what is mine.” But in the same breath, “I don’t want you now.” Instead he stood up and walked away, slinking away to sulk on his pillows. 

“Yeah, me neither.”

\--

The silence dragged as the day went on. Malik did not meditate but sit with his back to Desmond. The cold-shoulder routine might have been utter ridiculousness coming from anyone else in the world but present circumstances made Malik’s steely indifference to him dangerous in a way that turned his stomach over. He was left to do whatever he pleased—sit at the table with the plate of dates slowly reaching a point of inedibility, stand and look at the maps stretched across the walls, lay on the concrete and ponder his life’s choices. (Something he had far too much time to do already, really.)

There were no clocks in these rooms and therefore no way to know if the eternity of time he spent trying to decode the tiny scribbles on the wall was a matter of hours or a few precious minutes. The stink of long-dried sweat made him sneer at his own body and the scratching thirst in his throat had him longing for the arrival of lunch. 

“Are you afraid of anything?” Desmond asked. 

He was not expecting a response so the answering silence did not offend him. Instead he turned to look at Malik’s back, at the unruly crop of his black hair and the deep tan of his skin. The way his ears folded in very close to his head. The short hairs on the nape of his neck and the thick knotted muscles in his arms. The arch of his spine beneath his skin was a delicate-string of bones. His skin was flawless-everywhere-all-over except for the raised weal of the scar over his heart. 

Desmond was a disaster of marks and bruises and broken bones. His own skin was dry and cracking in the creases of his elbows and between his fingers. He felt stretched thin and pale. (And weary, so very weary.)

\--

Lunch came and Desmond ate. He drank the water and toyed with the cling wrap they’d used to carry his food to him, balled it up and stuck it under the plate with the dates on it. The silence and the stillness of the room was gnawing at him. 

Impatience was biting at the back of his neck like an itch he couldn’t scratch enough. Time kept moving in deceptive little eddies around him until he slapped his hand against the table and shoved the chair back away from him. There was no chance at escape (none at all) if Altair didn’t come to save his murdering soul mate. There was no proof that Malik was lying (right now) and no proof that he wasn’t. There was only Abstergo upstairs that expected _results, Desmond_ and Malik in front of him pouting like a child.

Desmond found the ridiculous bottle of lubricant that Lucy had shoved into his hand (two?) days ago and walked over to Malik. He shoved his pants off at the edge of the ugly-fucking-carpets and hesitated only a fraction of a second when he got to Malik’s side. Just long enough to rethink the brilliant idea of marching in with needy demands. Then he was stepping across Malik’s resolutely crossed legs and lowering himself into his lap with one hand on his shoulder to steady himself.

“I’m sorry,” Desmond said (but he wasn’t, not really the way Malik wasn’t ever sorry). “I’m ready.” But Malik didn’t budge. Desmond leaned in against his body, kissed his eyebrows and his cheek and the corner of his mouth. (Thinking every second that this-had-to-work.) Malik turned his face into the kiss and grabbed Desmond by the hips to pull him closer. 

\--

It wasn’t quick, precisely, but not the ordeal Desmond thought it might have been. They laid together in the aftermath, Malik to his right with his eyes closed and his skin flushed red and spotted from exertion.

“After this you think they’ll get me some ice cream?” Desmond said. “I could really go for some ice cream right now.”

Malik snorted a laugh, “perhaps.” 

“Can I nap?” Desmond said.

“Yes,” Malik said. He even reached over and grabbed Desmond’s pants for him.

\--

Desmond woke later, sore as hell. Malik was sitting there—within grabbing distance—watching him sleep. “That’s not cool, man.”

“The answer is yes,” Malik said. “There is one thing that frightens me. It is not always a powerful feeling but it is present, at all times, somewhere inside of me. Time and research has shown me that it’s impossible, that whoever or whatever made the things like us, they made us to be dependent. But, I am myself. I, who once incited a woman to kill her husband with little more than a few well-placed shadows. We are not invulnerable.”

It was a long-stream-of-babble with no clear end. But the summation was simply: “You’re afraid he won’t come back.”

“What reason could he have for returning to me? I, who slaughtered his children? I, who am incapable of giving him the thing he searches the globe to find? I, who happily wrenched the bones from his body?” Then he frowned so sharply it seemed to surprise even himself. “Again, Desmond.” Then Malik was pulling him close-close enough to strip his clothes away.

\--

Lucy came at the end of a long-long day with Tylenol and cold water. “Altair is going to die,” Lucy said. “When he dies, Malik will die.”

“I don’t care,” Desmond said. “Can I get a shower?”

“Yeah.” Then she motioned him forward but was polite enough to let him swallow the pills half the container of water.


	9. Chapter 9

There was an art to remembering. This, Malik had taught him during a quiet period. Remembering required _dark_ and _calm_ and a specific _goal_ but more than all of these things, it took time and patience. 

“Our memory does not degrade,” Malik said once. His hands had put Altair’s limbs into place and then fallen away. “But it evades us. There is simply too much to remember to recall it all in clear detail at all times. The things that are important to us—these are the things we do not lose. Everything else, it fades.”

Altair had forgotten what Masyaf looked like during the height of its reign. He had forgotten the smell of the desert after dark. He had forgotten Maria’s face and the feeling of loving her. But he had not forgotten the birth of his first sons, had not forgotten the sound of their first words or the pride that filled his chest until it felt as it if would break open at the men that had slowly grown into being.

But he could not remember what Darim looked like as an adult. He could not remember what happened after he returned to Masyaf to discover Malik had killed Sef. Altair did not remember Maria’s death but the all-too-pleasing sight of Malik’s detached head full of congealing blood. 

\--

“What are you doing?” the woman asked. She hovered at the doorway that led into the tiny room at the back of the house that seemed to be intended for use as a laundry room. Or perhaps just a storage room that allowed some extra separation from the cold of the outside and the warmth of the interior. It was early morning, the first yellow slants of light were slipping through the slats in the blinds covering the window in the door. The woman was wrapped in a house robe with tall slippers and fleece pants. 

Altair was sitting in the center of the room with his legs crossed in front of him and his hands laying loosely against his knees. There was a growing awareness in the pit of his stomach, that awful feeling of _loneliness_ that crept out from the blackened place where Malik should always have been. “I am sending the other a message to remind him I do not take kindly to being manipulated.”

“Are you telepathic?” she asked. Her shoulder against the doorway was a poor attempt at casual. Ignorance clutched at her face but it was hardly her fault that the knowledge of Altair’s kind had slipped away from the world. Malik was the one who had erased them.

“No,” Altair said. “At times, we are aware of each other’s emotions. When we feel something intensely, the feeling spreads. It does not often work but Malik is…receptive at the moment.”

The woman was quiet. Her weight shifted from a casual lean to a disapproving upright stance. Her hands caught at her elbows and she said, “won’t that put Desmond in danger? Didn’t you just say that his only chance at survival depends on Malik’s mood?”

The thought had not occurred to him before. It seemed inconsequential to him in that moment. “I did. You are correct in assuming Malik does not take kindly to being chastised. But you are mortal and therefore incapable of seeing things beyond your limited scope of understanding and the thick veil of emotion.” 

Those muscles at the edges of her mouth pulled tight. Altair had seen many killers in his time and he had seen many men and women pushed the point of violence. There was always a certain fractional change in their expressions just before it happened. This woman was at the precipice of some cataclysmic shift. “You’re right. It’s stupid of me to care about him—hell, I never even met the guy. Shaun was the one that ran that interference. I was all set to do my part—use the animus to figure out where Ezio hid the Apple, save the world that completely irrelevant bullshit. But I can’t help but feel like there is something I can do to save him, like maybe appeal to some fucking scrap of humanity in you to keep you from having a bitch fight with your boyfriend while Desmond’s life is on the line.”

“Do you care about Desmond’s well-being or the fact that he might be your last chance to find the treasure?” 

“What?”

“The Templars took him for a reason, likely the same reason you want him. They will use whatever means necessary to extract the information they need from him. Assassins are noble beasts, they will use obligation and dire consequence to get what they want. In truth, neither side is greater than the other. Malik created your kind to kill mine. When they turned on him, he created the Templars to keep Assassins entertained. So I ask, do you want to save Desmond for the sake of saving his life or are you protesting the lost opportunity to learn something?”

The woman said, “we need to know. Yes, we want his help. But I want him alive because he’s a person.”

“Malik will not kill the boy,” Altair said. He would not kill Desmond because Altair’s retort to the slow-unwinding _need_ in his gut would serve as proof that fucking Desmond was producing the desired results. If anything, Desmond would be safer and the men that held him captive would be in far greater danger. “Now leave.”

\--

Memories came on slowly. The act of digging through those things he did not wish to remember to catch at those he did. 

It started at Solomon’s Temple. It started at the very first moment Altair-saw-Malik. The exact moment when years-and-years of training ( _conditioning, Malik said_ ) came to a heightened fever pitch. It was a sudden stop of everything he thought-he-believed and a sick-twist of indecision that rolled like fire in his gut.

Malik’s hands on his wrist to hold the blade Altair held away from his body. There had been mortal terror in Malik’s eyes the likes of which he had never seen again. Malik’s voice saying, “they lied to you. Listen to me, they have lied to you—the mortals have lied to you. Let me prove it to you. If you kill me, you’ll die!” 

(Altair remembered the water when he failed to do as told, remembered the cold grip of it sliding across his face and the crushing weight of chains-around his chest. The tiny glint of light from the height of the well where the mortals stood with disapproving faces.)

“Explain!” Altair shouted at him. At the feeling in his chest that he could not explain. His head had been on _fire_ with the contradiction of things he felt and things he _knew_. This man that stood before him was a murderer and a liar. This man was a plague on the world that had to be destroyed. 

Malik showed him the mark on his chest, the spread of an eagle’s wing that was black against his skin. “You have one as well,” Malik said. “Together you and I are whole. You are mine and I am yours. These humans are the sons of other humans that filled their heads with stories of my crimes.”

“You deny you are a murderer?”

Malik’s face in a slipping grin. “I do not. I created the Assassins, I am one. I have killed many men. But I am you and you are me. If you kill me you will die.” Then his eyes went narrow and his body shifted. “What did they do to you? How long have you been here?”

\--

No, but Malik considered turning Altair against the old man to be a triumph of the highest level. The blood and bones he shed in the process were little more than an inconvenience for him. The two of them had made light of it in the years after, Malik with a roar of laughter as he described the way he could still feel his arm for several minutes after it was severed. At how he had amused himself by making his fingers twitch even after the whole of his arm was removed from his body. 

It was later-than-that, the feeling Altair meant to find.

\--

“I want Maria,” was not the first act of defiance but one of many. Malik was mellow in the long days at Masyaf, content to playact as a man and explore this feeling that existed in the close space between them. Altair said the words with one hand solidly on a blade. 

Malik-didn’t-care (not in those days). Malik never cared about inconsequential things, just about what he could get from them. It wasn’t love but greed that moved Malik when he said, “cut out your heart and give it to me. Then you can have her.”

“I did not come to you for permission,” Altair said.

“You did,” Malik said. “Give me your heart.”

\--

No-not-that.

\--

“What have you done!” was the white-hot-fury in Altair’s throat. The rage of something inside of him that had never been felt before. Malik told him it was only mortals that felt things with such intensity, that the briefness of their lives never allowed them the opportunity to learn to control themselves. Altair’s hands were seizing at Malik, grabbing him by the throat and throwing him against the ragged ground. The stink of slow decay filled the underground cell. 

Malik fought back, of course. He kicked and pushed and clawed with his feeble hands. It was hardly the first time they’d fought in the many years they’d shared together but it was the first time Altair had ever felt stronger. His face was hot and there were tears in his eyes and blood in his mouth. The cool hilt of the blade he pulled from its place on his back felt like a finality. 

The grate-and-snap of Malik’s bones and the elastic pop of the blade ripping through his heart was the single most gratifying sensation Altair had ever experienced. The static shudder of Malik’s body trapped under his made his heart throb twice-as-fast. A wash of relief (he had never felt before and had not felt sense) filled him with something like terrible joy. 

But Malik’s hand was against his, the grip of his fingers strong and the wet gasp of his breath loud, and then pulling at the blade to free it from his flesh. The clatter of the weapon hitting the ground beside them doubled the impotent rage Altair felt. 

“I wished now I had not hesitated to end your miserable life!” Altair screamed at him. 

Malik tipped his head in the dirt, touched his face with a blood-soaked hand and looked at him with such forgiving pity. “Then your son would never have been born and we would still have arrived at the same point.”

“You killed him,” Altair said. It was meant to be a scream and it came out as a weary sigh. “You killed my son.”

\--

When Altair returned from the back room, the woman was already at her computer and Shaun was eating toast and staring out the windows at the dreary fall of snow. She ignored him and Shaun acknowledged his presence with a slight nod.

“Thank you for the information,” Altair said.

“Try to get Desmond out,” Shaun said. “They didn’t find him until after we did. I don’t want him to die because I couldn’t be more discreet.”

Altair nodded.


	10. Chapter 10

Lucy said ‘Altair is going to die, when he dies Malik will die’. And it was a curious choice-of-words because it was like a consolation-prize. It wasn’t the hurtful, condescending mess of things like the chilly trickle of water they offered him to wash the filth of the floor and the phantom feeling of hands all over his body. It wasn’t the unwanted-reward of half-melted ice cream sandwiches left sitting on a plate in his tiny-square of a room.

No, the words and the look on her face and the shamed silence were all meant as some kind of condolences. Lucy-felt-sorry for him. Lucy-felt-bad about what she’d done. Lucy-had-listened to the monster she locked in the basement fucking him. (Sorry about your ass, but at least that man is going to die.)

Lucy who had been-a-friend (or something like it) not so very long ago. Lucy who had been a welcome sight once. Lucy who seemed like-a-person in the days when Vidic-was-a-monster (delusional, power hungry and _mad_ ).

\--

You-have-to-choose-a-master, Malik said.  
We reward results, Lucy said.  
Smart boys stay alive, William said.

“I’m offering you a chance to save the world,” Shaun had said to him just outside of the back door of the bar sometime after midnight. The sound of the city was dulled to a creeping roar so late at night; a quiet beast growling after something it didn’t like. But Shaun was clean-and-well kept, looked smart in a sweater vest with an air of something almost dangerous clinging to him. He called himself an Assassin but he looked like a college professor. 

Desmond had a helmet under one arm and the unzipped pull of his jacket offending his shoulders. The bar had left the stink of high class liquor clinging to his skin that blocked out the worst of the invasive stink of the nearby trash bins. “I got out,” Desmond said to him (but not: how did you find me), “I want to stay out.”

Shaun was not full of livid vitriol but a soft-sighing-sort-of-disappointment. “If not out of nobility, do it for your own protection. We’re not the only one looking for you.”

“You’re going to protect me?” Desmond said. That-was-a-real-line (back when Desmond was free) that he hadn’t heard since the first frightening days of freedom from his father’s oppressive rule. Big men with a thing for little boys had offered him a hundred-different-lies in exchange for a few-moments-of-his time. Desmond knew-then and knew-now how to take care of himself in the big bad world. So he shook his head at the offer from Mr. College Professor. “I think I can manage.”

“But the world can’t,” Shaun said again.

“It’s gotten by just fine without my interference. I tend to just fuck things up anyway.” Then he clapped a hand on Shaun’s shoulder and left with an implied thanks-but-not-thanks. It was six more glorious days of freedom and occasional slips of doubt before he found himself an honored guest of Abstergo Industries courtesy of Warren Vidic.

\--

Look at him now: stuck in a sorry little cell with the frigid freeze of water drying in his hair and the sour taste of gummy chocolate stuck to his teeth. There was a plastic bag with a bunch of sandwiches stuck in it (for whenever you get hungry, Lucy said) and a tall thermos of water to wash the stale-bread taste away. 

His bedmates, the black-skittering-bugs, were crawling across the scratchy canvas cover on the thin mattress. Now and again they crept over his fingers and the crooks of his elbows like ticklish-feathers before he flicked them away.

He’d left his shoes with Malik, lost his socks in the shower room and misplaced the short-sleeve shirt that was meant to go under the long sleeve one he’d managed to keep. The wall under his bare feet was gritty and sweating. Crumbles of dislodged things fell in unseen little showers, settling on the tops of his feet and the creases in the mattress. 

“Still not the stupidest thing you’ve done,” he said into the darkness. He rubbed his hand against his face and took a moment to feel fucking sorry for himself. (Just a minute now, just enough time to draw a shuddering breath in over his busy tongue. Just a minute to let his body clench up at the thought of not-so-many hours ago, Malik’s body over-and-against his and the drag of him moving _inside_. Just a minute to try to remember why-and-how it had all spiraled out of his control.)

\--

It wasn’t morning (or whatever this hell hole considered morning) when his door opened again. It hadn’t been long-enough, (Desmond hadn’t even slept yet). But the door was open and the wash of piss-yellow light was flooding in from the intersection just-behind Hammond. 

“What?” Desmond asked. His arms were behind his head and his feet were against the wall and he was doing-a-decent-job at pretending he was just stuck sleeping in someone’s shed again (the way he had when he was just a stupid kid). It took a half-breath for the fantasy to fall away and reality to crash into its place. He wasn’t Desmond-the-victorious living free for the first time but Desmond-the-whore-prisoner who gave it up to a monster for a bit of information. “You’ve got the wrong idea about me.”

“Get up,” Hammond said.

“No,” Desmond said. There was no strategic advantage to staying-where-he-was. There was no safety in this cramped box devoid of light and weapons. 

Hammond crowded in and hauled him out. The bulk of his heavy hand around the back of one of Desmond’s bent knees to pull him through the narrow doorway. Desmond shoved his free foot against the wall and curled forward to slap at the hand pulling on him. 

“Let me go!” Desmond shouted at him. Because the trick-was to be as-loud-as-possible. He shook his leg and dug his dirty-long-nails into Hammond’s thick-leather skin to try to pry him off. It worked for a matter of seconds, a brief catch of freedom before a hand grabbed his wrist and wrenched him to his feet. 

Hammond’s mouth was a sour slant across his, an assuming-and-unwanted pressure that felt like fire wherever it touched. The grip of his left hand at Desmond’s jaw was so vice-tight that he couldn’t control the impulse to open his mouth just to relieve the pressure. The bastard’s tongue was slithery-and-wet over his lips. 

Desmond bit him as hard as he could. Hammond slammed his head into the wall in retribution. His face a garish-white-thing with red drool over his chin. The resounding crash of Desmond’s body against the hollow wall set some poor bastard in the distance howling about starvation. The light at Hammond’s back was flick-flick-flickering as Desmond pushed his shoulder to the wall and got back to his feet. 

“This isn’t happening,” Desmond said. He glanced sideways, into the darkness at his back and the distant hope of a second flickering light. But running-was-madness when his best chance at survival hinged on these bastards returning him to Malik. Running-was-not-synonymous with results and Lucy-wouldn’t-like it. “Find some other sorry bastard to fuck.”

Hammond snorted a laugh, then he darted forward faster than the weight of his body would suggest and grabbed both of Desmond’s hands. It was a fast-spin of inertia before his arms were shoved up to the center of his back and his face was grinding against the dirty wall. Hammond’s bulk against his back, the thickening of his dick pressing against the small of Desmond’s back. There was an imposing force of a knee between his thighs kicking his legs apart. 

“Lucy!” Desmond shouted. He tried to pull his arms free and succeeded in making the grip just a touch too painful to ignore. Then Hammond was biting at the back of his neck just to draw blood as he started humping his hips against Desmond’s body. “Lucy!” Desmond shouted again.

“I thought he taught you better,” Hammond said all wet-and-thick at the back of his ear. He dropped one hand down to Desmond’s pants to hitch them down as the broad-callused-filthy palm rubbed against his hip, down and back to grip at his ass. “I listened to you, the sounds you made—you think anyone believes you didn’t want it?”

“ _I_ fucking believe it,” Desmond snarled.

Lucy was there in the next breath, furious-red and dressed in soft-fleece-pajamas with a gun in her hand. “Get off him,” Lucy said. She didn’t take a step forward, didn’t put herself within grabbing distance but maintained that space that gave her the advantage with the weapon of her choosing. Desmond thought he’d seen the worst of Lucy but nothing-not-anything compared the cold murder in her face as she leveled the gun at Hammond’s face. 

The loosening of the clench around his wrists was a conscious attempt to admit no fault. Desmond pressed as close to the wall as he could manage as he shuffled six-side-steps to where Lucy was. He tugged his pants up again, put her body between his and Hammond’s. For a half second there was an odd mixture of gratitude and safety he’d never thought he’d feel with Lucy around. Then she stepped back and to the side, looked away from Hammond long enough to catalogue the fresh marks all over Desmond.

The new bruise on his cheek, the bleeding wound on the back of his neck, the raised-red-welts on his wrists. 

“The monster in the basement doesn’t like people touching his toys,” Desmond said.

A muscle jumped in Lucy’s jaw before she shifted her stance. The gun stay pointed at Hammond but the infuriated glint of her eyes settled on Desmond instead. “Get back in your room,” she said. 

“What?” Desmond shouted at her.

Hammond’s grin was a white-glint of something disgusting. All of his weight seemed to redistribute itself: from fear of self-preservation to grim satisfaction. He reached out to shove Desmond’s shoulder and knock him back toward the doorway of the room. “Get in there,” he said.

There was a great choking of things he meant to say: that it-couldn’t-end like that, that-it-wasn’t-fair, that something-had-to-be-done. But his feet were stumbling on dirty floors and Hammond was blowing him a little kiss like a sweet promise to try-again-later. The blackness inside of his cell swallowed the choking sound of his protest as Hammond slammed the door shut on him and the key rattled in the lock.

“What were you thinking?” Lucy demanded. “Stupid. You’re stupid.” But the volume of her words was receding as it moved farther-and-farther away from him. Hammond’s response was not a decipherable sound but the shrug of a high-school-jock with too much confidence and not enough brains. 

“You can’t do this!” Desmond screamed back at them. He hit his fists against the rusted metal of the door and kicked his feet against the industrial sturdiness of the walls as his throat rumbled like an animal’s bloody growl and there was nobody-nothing to hear or care.

\--

There was no sleep that night. Desmond sat with his back against the corner of his room and watched the flickering of the yellow light under the swinging plate at the bottom of the door.

\--

“Honestly,” Lucy said to him when the door opened. Her hand around the frame like they were friends-or-lovers and he was only sulking over stupid things. Her hair was free down around her face and she was wearing white (always white) as she drew in a breath and let it out again. “What did you think was going to happen?”

“You know I read what you put in those boxes,” Desmond said. Because he’d spent hours with them in that piss-warm room. There was nothing to eat or drink or do in that room but look through the papers collected by historians as proof the great King of Swords was precisely the sort of criminal they accused him of being. “I know all of the things Malik has done. I know the men and women and children that he’s killed. I know about the wars, the genocide, and the complete and utter eradication of his own kind. I’ve sat in the room with the man and seen the blank space in his eyes where a soul should be. I know from first-hand experience that he has absolutely no remorse for the things he’s done.”

“So?” Lucy said.

“So why would I rather be with him than you?” 

The placating guilt that had colored her face with a modicum of humanity slipped away from her face. She straightened back onto her heels and cleared her throat. “It doesn’t surprise me that you’d feel that way. I thought you’d have more backbone, Desmond. I thought you’d fight and you didn’t. You folded.”

The inside of Desmond’s mouth was bloody as he stood up. There was a firestorm in his chest filled with the things he wanted to spit into her face. He wanted to tell her every-single-decision he had-thought-about-and-made since they shoved him into this tiny room. Oh, Desmond wanted to moan the words into her ear as he sank a short blade into her black gut and hear the last wheezing pass of her breath as comprehension showed in her slow-dying-eyes. “How about we trade places,” Desmond said instead, “you tell me what I should have done differently.”

“The real Assassins don’t give an inch,” Lucy said. She slapped a slippery-thin plastic baggie of fresh-hot toast against his chest and then thrust a bottle of water into his other hand. “Start walking,” she said. 

\--

Nobody had to push Desmond through the door. He stepped inside with Lucy frowning at his back and Malik slow-uncoiling from where he had been laying against the cushions. The door slammed into place and the locks rotated. The light in the room increased by increments until the long smudged streaks all along the walls was visible. The table had been overturned and the chairs were snapped into pieces left in piles across the ground. In place of the maps there was a word written in a language that Desmond could not read. 

Again-and-again it was scrawled on the walls and the floor. 

The room smelled like blood. Malik lurched when he got to his feet, staggered forward like a drunk. Desmond pulled his shirt off over his head, was sure to scrape the collar against the fresh-crusted wound at the back of his neck where Hammond had dug his teeth in. 

Malik looked so beaten and so weary. (So unlike the thing that he had been only yesterday, a master of his own body and by extension the world around him.) There was pinkness at the edges of his eyes that made him look soft in a manner that brought Desmond absolutely no comfort. 

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, Malik?” Desmond asked. He dropped the toast to the side and let the water fall out of his lax hand. “Someone you killed you wished you hadn’t? A war you started that you couldn’t end? Did you ever hurt Altair in a way you wished you had not?”

The hand that grabbed his face was the same remorseless grip that Malik had the very first time he put his hand on Desmond. The look in his eyes was the same soulless stare he’d had the day he broke Desmond’s finger. It was a perfect fit of Malik’s fingertips over the marks Hammond left when he squeezed Desmond’s mouth into opening. The dried stain of bloody spit was still caught on his face. Malik stepped left and went around, stood behind him long enough to pick at the hanging scabs on the back of his neck.

“Yes,” Malik said quietly. “There is one thing I have done to Altair that I wish I could undo. But it was not _this_.”

“But you’ve done it to someone,” Desmond said. 

Malik’s snort of laughter was as unwelcome as Hammond’s cool-and-slithering tongue in his mouth. “I have done it to you, Desmond. Not with blunt force but with a far more subtle abuse of power. You are not my lover but my victim as much as any of the others.”

Desmond closed his eyes, clenched his fists and let that unwanted little admission slip away. Malik was standing in front of him when he opened his eyes again. “They’re not afraid of you anymore, Malik. How could they be?”

Malik grabbed him by the face and dragged him forward and down to kiss him. The quick punch of their lips meeting turned in his stomach like that festering hatred that he’d been sitting with the whole night through. But Malik’s voice in quiet exaltation said, “you are a clever child, Desmond.” Then he was ducking to the side, grabbing at one of the chair legs as he moved toward the door. The wood impacted the solid metal of the door with a ricocheting crack. “You will bring me the animal or I will come and find him myself.” Malik’s voice was not a shout but the hardened sound of a promise. “I have been lenient with you. I have allowed you too many freedoms. You will deliver the animal or I will take back what is rightfully mine.”

“They’re going to kill Altair,” Desmond said.

The bitter roll of laughter that bubbled out of Malik was the most welcome sound Desmond had ever heard. Malik said, “they can try.”


	11. Chapter 11

There was no immediate obedience (such a thing was unthinkable) and the lag of time left Desmond standing in the center of a tornado of destruction. He looked down at the splintered wood under his feet, the mashed flesh of the dates that spread in slick smears on the floor. Malik had streaks of ink on his hands, across one of his cheeks and in finger-spread slashes across his chest. 

“I thought you said he could not resist,” Desmond said. He cleared his throat softly, “this looks a lot like resistance to me.”

Malik was leaning back against the wall by the door, looking casual while he waited for a victim. He was not the sturdy-soulless man he had been (only yesterday) but something with the vague air of humanity starting to condense around him. “He cannot resist; none of us are capable of such a feat. If we can find our mate, we must find our mate. He is, however, skilled at protesting.”

“Looks like quite a fucking protest,” Desmond said. 

“I killed his son,” Malik said. But there was no guilt in it. No, he said the words the way he might have said he made eggs for breakfast. It carried all the significance of sharing the unspectacular color of one’s socks. “It is not the worst thing I have done. This many years later it is not even a novelty. But, Altair remembers it very vividly. He remembers exactly how desperately he wanted me to die.”

“That doesn’t sound like a unique experience.” Desmond turned around to look at the door (not Malik) and scratched at the crusted blood on the back of his neck. It gave way with fresh pinches of pain. The muscles of his shoulders were knotted and tight, flinching tighter as he worked the forming scabs away from the wound. It was red-and-wet again, bleeding fresh trickles down his back. 

“I have been truly immortal the whole of my life, Desmond. I have been an abomination in the face of nature itself. The rest of my kind—they could die. I cannot. At first it was simply the absence of my other. Now,” Malik sighed, “Altair cannot kill me. He knows that he cannot. He knew that he could not when he tried. His protest is not that he wishes to end my life but that he wishes he could end his own.”

“Will he still come?” Desmond asked.

“I’ve lost the feeling,” Malik said. “What I intend to the animal will numb the residual effects. Altair is aware that he has been called but he feels no urgency. Also, he is angry about you.” There was a quirk of a grin at the edge of Malik’s lips. A dreamy sort of look in his eyes that was nothing-at-all like something a murderer should have been capable of. 

Desmond didn’t say _of course_ but he felt it was implied in the hang of his head. He left Malik to guard the door and tip-toed through the disaster to where the rugs remained undisturbed save for the scratches of ink into the fibers. He laid in the pile of cushions with his arms over his head and his feet against the floor. 

\--

There was a great blossoming of noise, after a while, the indecipherable protests of a man and the cold silence of another. It sounded like a mass of feet and a series of bangs against the walls that led to the door. Malik watched it with all the tilted-curiosity of a cat. He turned his body toward the door but did not straighten or prepare himself to attack. 

“—crazy bitch!” was the scream of frantic fear as the door opened and Hammond fell through it backward. His clothes were torn in catches around his arms and the neck. He was red with exertion, sweating enough to dampen his clothes and slick his hair down on his forehead and just behind his ears. His body was massive as it clawed for purchase in the bits of broken things all across the floor. Sawdust and fat wooden bits stuck to the backs of his forearms as he clamored to his feet. “I don’t know what the lying bastard told you—”

Malik slapped him on the face. It was a feat with the seven inches of height Hammond had on him, but Malik made the motion look fluid and easy. “I despise a liar,” Malik said. He stepped out of the wild grab of arms moving toward him. “Of course you know what he has told me. You have little mechanical ears all around my room. You know he has told me nothing.” Malik was going in a circle around Hammond while the man turned on his heels trying to watch every predatory motion Malik made.

“I know he thought he’d get something if he gave something,” Hammond said. “Just because he got scared and backed out doesn’t mean he didn’t want it.”

There was a flat sigh of breath out of Malik’s nose. He kicked Hammond in the back of his thick leg, grabbed his arm when the man started to flop forward and wrenched it straight back so that the bone popped and Hammond screamed with a spray of spittle into the air. “You stupid little mortals have such limited comprehension. I walked this planet before your kind _existed_. There is no lie you can tell that I will believe.” Malik walked around to stand in front of Hammond. 

Hammond was on his knees with one arm lax at his side and his other reaching up to shove Malik back. The effort did little to deter Malik; the grasping of fingers across his bare skin amused Malik. A cruel sort of grin spread across his face. 

“I could tell you what I have done to animals like you. History is littered with the little tortures I created for the foul thing you are.” Malik grabbed Hammond by the meaty jaws and pulled him forward. He was leaning forward, staring straight into the man’s wild eyes. Hammond was shoving at Malik’s neck and shoulder trying to get enough leverage to shove him back. “You disgust me, animal. But that is not the lesson I wish to teach today.” Then he straightened again.

“You’re going to die,” Hammond said.

“Desmond name a bone.”

Desmond was crouching against the carpets, halfway to standing and halfway to inching backward against the wall. There was no perverse amusement to be had in watching Hammond’s round face blush up nearly purple at the sickening hang of his arm loose at his side. “Jaw,” he said.

Malik punched Hammond in the temple and kicked him down onto his side. “Hold still,” he said to the man. Then he stomped on the man’s face as Hammond grabbed uselessly at his ankle and wriggled and squirmed to get out of the way. The bone snapped and Hammond’s whined a slow-sharp-sound with a sputter of blood out of his swelling face. Malik looked at him without pity, reached and grabbed him by the shirt front to pull him up. “You may not have what is mine,” Malik said. 

Then he snapped the man’s neck and let his body slump over toward the door. Malik looked at him with a sneer of disapproval for the spit-and-blood on his hands. He took one step closer to the door and raised a fist to pound on it. “Remove the corpse.” 

The door opened, after a moment, and an older man with gray in his hair shuffled in to grab Hammond by the arms and drag his body out again. Malik stood in the middle space between the door and Desmond as they worked. He did not make a move for his freedom, did not speak a threatening word against the men that stood guard with guns, but stand in place as silently and stiffly as a statue. 

Lucy tossed a bag of food in through the door and rolled two bottles of water across the dirty floor. They crossed the blood swath where Hammond had been dragged out and left rolling prints until they came to a stop against a piece of one of the chairs.

Then the door was closed again and Desmond was alone with Malik (smiling-oh-so-softly down at his own hands).

\--

The most bitter of truths was that Desmond had never excelled. He was (at best) a subpar son, a disappointing novice, a delinquent juvenile (often running from men in uniforms) and once a competent bartender. He was good enough at pretending he was normal. He was good enough at flirting with women. He was good enough at handling money and carving a life out of the blank nothing before he turned sixteen and won his freedom.

Desmond was not the strongest. Desmond was not the fastest. Desmond was not the smartest. 

The only thing that Desmond had ever possessed was survival instinct. The most basic and unremarkable of traits to have (his father had once remarked to him that Desmond couldn’t fight his way through a pack of kittens but he could survive the end of the world). It had been the only useful thing he needed when he was sixteen-on-the-streets. Just that little bit of an edge that he had on the world had steered him away from the men-and-women that wanted to take something from him and landed him happily into the paths of those that looked after wayward things like him.

\--

“It’s not true, you know,” Desmond said. The smell of Hammond’s blood was still hanging pink in the air. The sack of food that Lucy had thrown him was still tipped over just beyond the drying swath of red. “You didn’t rape me.”

“Consent is irrelevant when you do not have the power to say no,” Malik said. He waved the very idea away. “You do not need to make me feel better about my decisions, Desmond. I do not feel poorly about them to start with. You are a means to an end that I will continue to exploit as necessary. That you’re agreeable makes things easier.”

Desmond got to his feet. There was too much debris to put in force in his footsteps. (And honestly charging across the distance like a great bull of an animal would not have impressed Malik at all.) His bare skin prickled in anger and a flush came into his skin (that someone once told him made him look ‘fetching’). “I’m smarter than they think I am, Malik. I’m more manipulative than you think I am. Everybody feels bad for the idiot. They use him, they mock him, they treat him like shit but they still feel _bad_ for him. I read those boxes they kept in that room. I listened to every word you said. I chose a side long before you said I should.” 

“You’re an ignorant child,” Malik said. But the interest in his face did not follow the tone of the words. The shift in his body language that turned him fractionally closer to Desmond’s body did not agree with the dismissiveness in that statement. Malik’s head was tipped back just enough to show the steady dull pulse in his throat. 

“I want out,” Desmond said. “You were my best chance. I have been whatever you need me to be since the moment I realized they would never let me leave.”

“A victim,” Malik said softly. His hand against Desmond’s chest was a cool, questioning pressure. His eyes narrowed as he thought back over everything he had heard-and-seen-and-done in these past days. “A pathetic wretch. An _ally_.”

Desmond grabbed Malik by the face and pulled him off balance and up, kissed him the way he’d kissed his girlfriend two-years-ago when he had one. The memory of how he loved her softened the angry rigidity of his jaw. His arm around Malik’s back was a cradle not a pull and the way Malik fell against him was eager-and-heavy. 

Malik grabbed him by the ass—two handed—and Desmond burst out a hysterical-sounding laugh. “What?” Malik said.

“You are terrible at romance,” Desmond said. Then he kissed him again as he let himself be pushed back-back, up and over the mess of broken things to where the carpets were still warm from their bodies and the cushions were a welcome-worn-softness against his abused body. 

\--

Malik did not fuck him like he was a stranger and that might have been the strangest thing in the world. He-did-not know Malik the familiar way that Malik touched him. His reactions were off-center of what Malik wanted or expected and it had taken once-twice-now-three times to correct the resisting submission of his body to those touches. 

He panted heavy and loud and groped at Malik’s arms and his chest and kept both of his legs wrapped tight around the man. His nails dug momentary ruts into Malik’s skin even as his body started shaking-shaking-apart because it was too fucking much. 

There was insanity in the brutal way Malik used him and the way his body gave to the sensation until he was gagging for breath as he came. 

\--

Then, after, when he woke up without realizing he had fallen asleep, Malik was sitting naked not so far away from him with one of the water bottles in his hand. It had been wiped clean (God alone knew where or on what) and the bag of what turned out to be sandwiches and chunks of various meats and cheeses. 

“Your question,” Malik said.

Desmond groaned, stretched to relieve the tension in his back and sat up before an unhappy twinge in his thigh sent him back to lying flat. He rubbed at the inside of his thigh while he thought, aware with every motion of his hand, that Malik was watching him intently. “What broke you? Why are you broken?”

“Ah,” Malik said. “Altair. I do not now remember how it happened in any great detail. I do not remember if it was painful or if it was so gradual that I hardly noticed. Experimentation leads me to believe that my soul did not fade quietly into blackness. As you said, there was a time I loved Kan.”

“How did Altair break you? You’ve said resistance is impossible.”

“Voluntary resistance is impossible. We were born in a thousand different places, Desmond. Some of us in the frozen north, some in the frozen south. One poor man came back to living on the edge of a volcano. I woke in the sea, swept to and fro by the currents. It took most of my kind years—sometimes hundreds of years—to find their other. But they were always aware of direction they should travel to find their other. Kan convinced the kingdom I built that we had been ripped apart because of my actions. I did not believe him then, I did not believe him until I found Altair in the cramped, dusty tunnel of Solomon’s Temple.”

“Because he tried to kill you?”

Malik snorted at the notion. He stretched out in a fluid motion, laid next to Desmond with his arms behind his back and his legs bent at the knees. The heat of his body was a welcome distraction from the unusual coolness of the room. “No. Whatever separated us—they pinned Altair deep beneath the ocean. He does not remember about his time there save for that it was black and heavy. But he has the most fascinating panic attacks—they are terrible in their intensity—whenever I call for him. The loneliness he feels when I miss him is one and the same to him as the crushing weight of the ocean.”

“I’m sorry,” Desmond said and then before Malik could open his mouth to refute it. “Just shut up. I don’t care if you think your deserve sympathy or if you are unmoved by it. Something terrible happened to you, something was taken from you that shouldn’t have been and I want you to understand no matter how unforgivable your acts after that were, I am sorry that thing happened to you. I wish you could have had the life you were meant to have.”

Malik’s lips were caught between a smile and a frown. The grip of superiority was tilted across its face as if it were hanging on only by the thinnest of threads. Then he let out a noise like a saddened sigh, saying, “but I feel Kan is right. Whatever was done to anger our maker, I believe it was Altair and I that did it. Why else would we have been thrown so far apart? Why else would they have left him in such a terrible place?”

Desmond shivered and Malik turned to look at him. “They’ve turned the heat off. They will not return for you.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Desmond said. “I’m better off in here than out there anyway.”


	12. Chapter 12

Altair drew in the deep cold of the gathering storm. His bare fingers clenched around the warm-worn grip of the leather covering his palms before he lifted his hands to pull the hood forward around his face. The hood was serviceable but not warm and the chill slid easily in, crouching at the back of his neck and sneaking like tendrils down his spine. It was not the darkening threat of fresh snow that made his body shiver but the anticipation of a battle yet-to-come. 

Somewhere, not so very far from where he stood, Malik was broiling in rage. The sensation came to him like a tiny fire in his chest: the rapid pound of his heart something like a rabbit shrieking through the woods in fear of a hound. Altair closed his eyes and let his arms hang at his sides. The stillness of purpose was filling in the loose gaps and the forgetful corners of his body. 

A promise had been made. 

\--

There were two things that were irrevocably true. Only two in all of the many years Altair had lived that never wavered nor mutated but remained firmly, rigidly set. 

One; Altair could not die. Not ever.

Two; Altair had no desire to save the world.

\--

It always ended with blood, the filthy red wash of it across dusty floorboards as Malik sat so daintily in the parlor with the candles burning down to little puddles. He was a striking figure with his exotic dark skin and his fine-tailored clothes. An assortment of small blades spread out over a blood-spotted square of muslin on a spare table. Malik, himself, (the dashing figure), so terribly unconcerned with the massacre at his back as he leafed easily through a book he’d found.

“Why?” Altair asked. He’d seen the slashed-red-face of his long-dead wife. He’d already touched the cold-stiffness of her body stuffed behind the ornate chair to Malik’s left. The bodies of the maid and the cook were spread in bits and pieces like a trail for him to follow to this room. Anger bubbled and coiled inside of his chest at the useless waste of death. But Malik was an inhuman monster with dead-black eyes and the quirk of a calm smile on his lips. This was business (not pleasure) and a man ought to be civil about business (so said the monster himself). “There were no children.”

“But there might have been. She was a poor choice. Weak-hearted and cowardly. Her father’s family was prone to laziness and her mother’s family was prone to idiocy. Even with your admittedly superior genetics any children that came from her would have been little better than slobbering little mongrels. Besides,” Malik said as he slapped the book shut and dropped it to the side of the chair, “I hated her.”

Altair did not sit but situated himself so the last bit of the candlelight gave him a clear view of Malik’s face. There was a red streak across his face, the tell-tail dried smear of several shallow gouges at his throat and just under the hard line of his jaw. Altair’s wife had not given in without a fight, at least. “You hate everyone. It’s hardly worth the time and effort you were obviously willing to expend to kill her.”

“Ask me not to kill them, Altair. Tell me what you are willing to give in return.”

“I have given you everything I am willing to give you,” Altair said.

Malik moved silently, the flutter of action mutated by the age of his mind and the natural elastic youth of his body. He was on his feet and standing in front of Altair in a single beat of their hearts. Altair hit him because something was caught in his chest between sick-guilt-and-brittle-anger. Malik hit him back with half as much interest. “You don’t care about them. You think you’re better than me and you aren’t.”

“I want to be,” Altair hissed at him. “You exalt in your emptiness and I fight it. I am not the thing you are. I will never allow myself to be.”

“You’re a child. You cannot comprehend the meaning of forever. You think these few centuries have been hellish to suffer through? You think you’ve discovered the meaning of boredom and isolation and _pain_? Do you imagine, Altair, that you have reached the lowest point you are capable of reaching?” Malik’s laugh was remorseless. “One day you will crawl to me on bloody knees and beggar’s hands asking just to make the relentless monotony of these long days _stop_. And I will give you the same satisfaction you gave me: my cold indifference and my distance and my _silence_.” 

Altair grabbed him by the face and snapped Malik’s neck with his breath like a catch of panic rattling loose-and-wet in his chest. The darkening storm of something unthinkable was brewing at the back of his skull and sinking down into his chest. There was the taste of salt water on his tongue when he turned and _ran_ but it found him in the dark beyond his home. 

It always found him in the end.

\--

The road that led to the Vault gave way easily to the crunch of gravel rocks and long-worn-ruts where prisoner transports masquerading as service vehicles had often travelled. His boots sank softly into the damp mud there as the sky ripped open with the softest of plush noises and unleashed a hellish-white-fall of snow. 

Only his red sash was visible at any distance and it was hardly bright enough to catch the eye of any but the sharpest and most dedicated mortal. 

\--

Most of the time, Altair simply pretended Malik did not exist. It was easier-that-way. Everything was easier to think about when he did not have to try to stretch it out beyond the confines of the simple mortal lives he pretended to live. Malik was his other-the-second-half-of-his-soul, the only person on this planet that he could love-in-any-meaningful-way. 

Lena had been half-drunk on cheap wine with a pretty pink smile on her face and a blossoming affection in her voice when she sighed at him with her chin in her hand. (Not so long before they fell madly in love with one another.) “You look like someone broke your heart. You know—at first I thought you just hated everyone but I don’t think that’s true. I think someone broke your heart. Was it bad?”

Altair had the occasion (more than once) to practice the art of building lies into a life story but there were commonalities to every alias he’d ever taken. Malik was a perpetual fact of his life, something inescapable that shaped every single decision he made. Things like leaning forward on his elbow to smile in mock-drunkenness back at Lena’s pretty-pinked cheeks. (You’re going to die one day, he thought. One day I’ll set the monster free and he’ll find you and slit you throat to thigh.) “He told me he was my soul mate,” Altair said.

“Ouch,” Lena said.

Altair shrugged. “I believed him, once. I’ve given up men though. Strictly women from here on.”

Lena’s smile torqued to something heated-and-simple. She so-did-love a challenge and nothing was a greater conquest than fixing the broken heart of a man recently converted to heterosexuality. Years later, after the baby, Altair couldn’t remember why he’d picked her out of a thousand other faces. He only remembered that smile on her face when she thought she had a chance with him and the tiny little thrill of hope it brought.

\--

Killing came natural to Altair in a way that was entirely different than the way it came to Malik. For Malik, murder was the divine right granted to him by the things-that-made him. Time and repeated victory had cemented the notion firmly in place. Mortals were temporary distractions for Malik, a collection of limbs and changeable traits that were easy to exploit, exhaust and then extinguish. He delighted in the process of driving humanity into fruitless wars and playing out on the battlefields.

For Altair, the art of killing was a purely physical form. His body was stronger, taller, leaner, faster than Malik’s. He was younger (so much younger with those lost black years beneath the sea) and this expounded the insult of his superior skill. But there was no joy in it; death brought him no sense of peace or even the most fleeting sense of accomplishment. It was always a means to an end.

\--

The snow that fell in thick sheets from the sky was enough to cover the shallow indentations from his boots. It stuck to the fence that marked the edge of the Vault’s massive property. There was a hum of electricity singing through the twisted metal wires. Altair held his hands just above the fence to feel the unnatural tickle of it before stepping back to judge the height of the fence. It would not be a pleasant task to scale the ropey wires with the electricity burning through his gloves and shoes, zipping along through his body. It wouldn’t have been impossible but it hardly seemed the most logical course of action. 

So he followed it along to where the gate stood with the massive metal plates proclaiming this property to be a nature preserve. It warned away any casual observers and listed a number for inquiries. There was a metal box sticking out from one of the massive metal poles. It was an uncomplicated matter to pry the box open. But the inside was a series of key holes and a number pad that was indecipherable without any context. 

And so he was left with the unpleasant task of going over the fence. (Altair was so fond of the simplest possible solution.) He took off his gloves and his boots before grabbing the livid-hot-wire of the fence. It threw him once and left an unpleasantly metallic taste in his mouth when he did manage to hang on. 

\--

There was a pattern to their lives. Altair would find a wife and have a family and Malik would come when a sense of peace finally settled over their lives. The monotony of family life sank through Altair like the finest brandy saturated the mortals in good will and easy smiles. Everything seemed possible with a family. Hope-and-happiness did not seem like such terribly abstract things when he chased his children through the garden in the back yard.

Until Malik came with his sharpest knives and flayed hope to the dirty bones. They exchanged words. Malik taunted him and Altair bitterly played along. Sometimes he killed Malik and sometimes he did not. They parted ways again for a matter of months as the panic in his gut slowly unfurled into an unstoppable force.

When it became unbearable, when nothing could be done to stave off the crushing weight of the panic, Malik would come like the first wavering rays of sunlight breaking through the blackness of the water. His hands were salvation against Altair’s sweat-soaked-skin. His voice was a promise of something _wonderful_ pouring hot little whispers into his cold-wet ears. Altair fell into without reservation and there was a perfect moment of peace unlike any other feeling in the world.

So they existed together. Malik at his side in such a way that made the monster he (sometimes) was seem unthinkable. Malik-the-man was filled with such unselfish compassion poorly covered with his rigid morality and scathing wit. Altair loved him in a way that felt almost exactly the same way that swallowing fire felt. 

It slipped and it slid and then it crumbled out from under their feet. Malik with blood on his hands shake-shake-shaking apart. “It’s happening,” Malik always said to him. There was a terrible fear in his face when he choked on the words. “It’s happening, stop it, Altair, stop it.” 

Altair held him with viciously-possessive arms that weren’t strong enough to keep Malik at his side. They broke apart again—in violence—with Malik’s teeth tearing into his skin in the morning when there had always been soft kisses before. They tore away from one another in screaming fights and bloody-little-fights.

“What do you suppose we did,” Malik asked him once when his soul had gone cold and there was no light in his eyes anymore. “You and I? What do you think we did that scared the petty Gods so greatly they did this to us?”

Altair was practical-not-emotional without a soul of his own. “We tried to kill them.”

“That doesn’t seem a great enough crime,” Malik said.

“Isn’t it? Every living creature wants to live, Malik. With your skill for strategy and my skill for assassination I imagine we were the first credible threat they faced. What chance do we have against them now, like this?”

Malik sneered at him in the end and left him to live whatever life he desired. So it went time-and-time again.

\--

On the ground again, Altair shook the crisp feeling of black-burnt-skin off and wiped greasy feeling out of his hair. His gloves fit over his raw hands and his boots were a comfort over the crisped soles of his feet. The vast nothing of the land around him offered him little hope of finding the hidden door so he took a moment to stand very still and close his eyes.

“Where are you?” he whispered into the air and waited for the answering pull in his gut to pull toward Malik.


	13. Chapter 13

So very long ago now, back before firelight gave way to electric light, Malik’s soul became his soul and for the very first time in conscious memory, Altair had felt the brilliant lightness of being that came from love. They were brothers in those early days, elated by the mirror of their desires.

“I understand now,” Malik had said to him when they found themselves laying in the dirt far beyond the grasp of civilization. The stars over their head were superb white lights and the infinity of the sky seemed so very much like a promise of wonderful things to come. Malik’s voice was not rigid but soft-and-smooth. “Why they would not kill each other.”

“Who?” Altair asked. In those faraway days, he was a naïve little boy filled with the wonder of the world and the fresh-scabbed wounds of escaping the conditioning of his mortal tormenters. (Oh-and-Malik had torn them apart one-by-one when Altair laid the names of the men who dropped him into the well when he misbehaved.) 

“The sisters—well, any of them. The first I incited to kill her husband by confusing and blinding her. When the blade sank into his heart she made a sound like a very small animal when it’s suddenly kicked. I remember how pleasing it was to hear, to know that the pain her husband felt was mirrored in her. But the sisters, I put them in separate rooms and I tortured them one after the other—trying to find a way to kill them, you understand. Every night when I left them I offered them the chance to kill the other. Every morning I found them laying against the same wall like they could feel their other through it. It could have gone on forever. But the dark one said she couldn’t bare it any more. She said she’d do it. When it put them together, she started crying. She said that she could not do it. She begged her sister to forgive her, told her that she thought she could do it but that she couldn’t.”

“What did you do?” Altair asked.

Malik let out a sigh. “I killed them, eventually.” Then he twisted around, rolled onto his stomach and crept forward where he could rest his head on Altair’s shoulder. “But I understand now. I feel as if I’ve been filled with light and there is no space left for anything else.”

“Do you feel bad for what you’ve done?”

Malik laughed then. His body coiled in on itself as the rolls of laughter tore out of him. His head shook and his fingers brushed through Altair’s short-hair. “No. I do not regret anything. There is nothing I have done that I have not done with the utmost forethought. I would not repeat the actions _now_. I understand that the things I have done are _wrong_ but it seems irrelevant. As if I am reviewing the acts of another man and not myself.”

Altair did not press him for further answers. They laid in the quiet and watched the sky bleed from midnight black into the bright blue of day. 

\--

Gravity shifted. The ground that had once seemed solid was little more than an inconvenience when the first hesitant brush of Malik’s soul against his set a fire somewhere under his skin. The wet-slip of a distant panic sounded somewhere in the back of his mind. But (more importantly) there was the familiar armor of a long-dead man to shield him from the crushing-grip (of the water). Malik was whispering-whispering-whispering into his ear from some distance and there was only the _need_ to answer it.

Altair started walking. 

\--

In the peaceful times, they built houses and hid from mortals with a determination that mirrored Malik’s obsessive quest for vengeance. Once, they found themselves in a poor hut settling deeper into the moist mud of a densely overgrown forest. The other things that lived around them had not been driven away but seemed to realize all on their own that Malik-and-he were predators that could not be chased away.

“I miss music,” Altair happened to say. There was no silence in the forest, but the constant steady beat of living things. The birds in the distant tree tops warbled and chirped and sang their songs in tune with the nearly constant rain. 

Malik was picking apart a leaf, shredding it along the veins for lack of anything better to do with his hands. He dropped the green bits and rubbed his hands across the top of his thigh. “I could sing for you,” he said. 

It felt familiar, the knowledge that Malik could sing. (Even that he enjoyed it, that it had always come to him naturally.) It felt _right_ in a way that nothing (save for the feel of Malik’s soul against his) had felt since he woke up on the shore years before. Malik sang-and-Altair _listened_ and it had always been that way. So Altair nodded his head and turned his body to look at the pink blush on Malik’s cheeks. “Please,” Altair said.

Malik sang for hours, for days, until his voice was a soft white noise caught in his throat. 

\--

Altair happened upon a deer—a young male—with snow hanging damp and thick across it’s fur and dusting the curls of its antlers. The buck looked at him with the singular expression of a bit of prey regarding a threat. The deer was not feeble, nor was it incapable of defending itself. It flared its nostrils at him and then turned its head and body away and walked away. 

There was a track in the snow where the deer had walked and a nearly imperceptible dip in the grass itself where many feet (and perhaps vehicles) had often travelled. It marked a straight line to the gate. Altair’s feet fit into it easily and he crouched-just-a-little as he began to move faster. The beating of his heart was steadily-grown-faster in his chest and the heat of his blood was bringing heat back into the winter-chilled pallor of his exposed skin.

\--

But there was the matter of lovers, in those youthful days when things like that seemed important still. Altair had taken Maria as a wife (not a lover) and Malik and named a price for the betrayal. (But Malik never saw it as a betrayal, not any of his wives. Even with their blood tacky on his hands, Malik would not put voice to the cold certainty that Altair felt. Every woman was a willful betrayal.) 

Malik did not make a habit of committing to lovers, but picked the healthiest and sturdiest humans and amused himself with them for years at a time. Once, in Italy, Malik picked a boy that looked very much like Altair and set the Templars on him like rabid dogs after prey. And he watched-and-watched-and-watched as the boy had his life torn apart and stitched together again. 

Ezio was not counted as a lover if only because Malik would not reveal himself to the Assassins (not again, not after they’d slowly-grown-ignorant of the truth). But he found ways to amuse himself with Ezio’s body nonetheless. Altair found him around a dirty corner in Venice where the water smelled of shit and the buildings seemed to float. Malik was a poor excuse for a whore with a brilliant red mouth and vividly dark hair. 

“This is what you do without me?” Altair demanded. “Dress yourself like a woman and chase after men?”

Soulless, Malik’s eyes were blank-black and his smile was a twist of arrogance across his face. His voice (once so beloved to Altair) was a terrible parody scratching out of his throat. He spoke Arabic to Altair, always, always _Arabic_ as if he couldn’t remember any other language. He said, “you dress as a man to chase women. I do not protest.”

Altair grabbed Malik by the elbow and pulled him back, shoved him against the side of a building without thinking-at-all what he meant to do next. (Something terrible, something that _hurt_.) 

“I am not a romantic, Altair. I satisfy the needs and wants of my body without the premise of an empty promise I have no intention of keeping. Go find some woman to _love_ and leave me to my own entertainment.” But Malik’s body tipped close to his, the jut of his hips and the obscene wet open sprawl of his mouth were indecent little invitations. Altair did not kiss him but slap him. 

Malik’s laugh trailed after him as he ran in confusion.

\--

To the Templar’s credit, the opening to the Vault was a well hidden patch of grass distinguishable only by the narrow outline of melted snow. It was a square easily big enough to admit a person with a larger opening no so very far away clearly used to accommodate larger needs. Altair felt around the edges of the opening for some sort of lever that would allow him to open it. 

The snow was damp and cold against his bare fingers and the metal was warm where heat escaped through the poor seal. But there was no obvious lever—perhaps it opened from beneath and some sort of signal was used to indicate the need for it to open. 

Altair took in a breath and closed his eyes. He straightened his body and reached for the blade that hung from his hip. (Malik so loved the sword.) “Send them to me,” Altair said into the air.

\--

There was no smooth transition from the companionship of brothers-and-friends into the messy affair of lovers. The desire was an echo of a selfish hurt still stuck beneath Altair’s skin from the in-between times when they were not connected. He invited himself into Malik’s bed.

“You do not have to,” Malik said. As if the whispered-little-words were more important to him than Altair could have guessed. Perhaps he meant it to spare Altair the embarrassment of trying. Perhaps he meant it out of guilt for all the damage he had done in the past. Perhaps it was only meant for himself, to know that he had given the option to Altair when he had already taken so many from him. “Not all of our kind are lovers. Some are sisters, some brothers, some friends, only some of lovers in this way.”

Altair pinned his wrists to the sparse cushion beneath him. “This is what I want.” It was not as simple as that. Kissing Malik was very much like trying to kiss his brother—awkward, vaguely chilling and a twisting sense of disgust nestled in the bottom of his gut. The familiar touch of his body was a welcome distraction but it did not arouse him. 

Malik’s arms around him pulled them flat together and rolled them onto their sides. “Wait and do it when we have no souls, if you are very set on this. What we do there will follow us here.” 

“I would hurt you,” Altair said.

“I won’t care.” Malik kissed him on the forehead and pushed him flat so he could lay his head against Altair’s chest. His ear fit awkwardly against the raised cinch of the scar across Altair’s chest. 

When it did happen—at last—it was a decade later after Malik’s soul slipped away and Altair was lonesome for want of a wife to distract him. He followed Malik across the continents to find him, caught him hot on the trail of another stupid mortal man to amuse himself with. Altair dragged him in through a narrow door, crashed into a blackened room with Malik’s laugh scratching across his skin. 

“Come on then,” Malik hissed at him as he tore Altair’s clothes. There should have been more violence in his hands on Altair, the way it had always been, but Malik fell to his knees without a second taunt. His mouth left a wet streak on the bared stretches of Altair’s skin before he was sucking on his dick with echoing eagerness. They fucked against a bowing wall: Malik’s hands on his shoulders and his legs around his hips as he bit-and-licked at Altair’s mouth with frantic desperation. “You fuck your wives like this?” Malik asked him with his lungs seizing up for want of air. There were bruises all across his flesh that had yet to fade away and fresh ones blossoming up in their places. 

“You know I don’t,” Altair said.

Malik’s fingernails were biting into his skin and his teeth were raking across his neck as if he meant to tear his throat out. He didn’t-say (never said) _you belong with me_.

\--

The Vault opened with a hiss of air and the mechanical grinding of hinges. Beneath the rising door there was the ominous click and swish of bodies assembling and the expected rise of firearms. Altair looked down at them, saw the sick pallor of their sun-deprived skin and the unhealthy wetness of their eyes as they looked back at him. His lips twitched into a smile (not so unlike Malik’s) as he stepped forward toward the edge of the opening. 

Their fingers were sliding into place over the trigger of the guns all save for the woman in white that crouched in the center clutching the metal hilt of a sharpened bone dagger. Altair did not have to wonder where she had gotten it. Malik had left thousands of those arms littered through Syria in their time at Masyaf. His bones were easy enough to find. His methods were easy enough to divine from his many kills. 

The only two secrets Malik had ever successfully kept from his little Templar children were who his soul mate was and exactly what Altair was capable of. 

Altair stepped forward, one foot across the metal lip of the opening and the other out beyond the stability of ground. He fell—down and straight into an onslaught of searing metal bullets.


	14. Chapter 14

Malik had been called oh-so-many names in the innumerous years of his life. He did not bother to remember most of them in much the same way he did not bother to remember who had labelled him or why they had done so to begin. But there were a few that had followed him across the face of the miserable mud ball he had watched mutate from a wild-and-unknown thing to the tamed-and-suffocating thing it was today.

“Monster,” the black-eyed woman had hissed at him. He remembered her best, out of all of them. There had been such passion in her as she fought for her life with a single knife and the leg of a broken chair. Her words had been bitter bites against the fear that her squalling newborn must have felt after Malik left it laying on the floor in the other room. When she died (at last) it was with wide-open-eyes filled bottom-to-top with disbelief. She had pushed the knife through his throat and the inconvenience of blood pouring out of his mouth had not stopped him from using that same blade to carve her heart out of her chest. After he wiped his hands clean on the suckling-child’s blanket and sang to the red-faced little gremlin until it calmed down. Even it—with its father’s brown hair and its mother’s black eyes—seemed to know exactly the sort of monster Malik was. The fear never-ever leeched away from the baby’s face even long after Malik was gone. He found the man the baby became and slit his throat between too buildings and thought the man looked more relieved than scared.

Then there was, “devil!” A common cry against him in dark times. It wrenched free from the mouths of men with superstition held tight around their bodies like capes. Malik was burned as a witch no less than seven times. But once, he was ordered pressed to death (a particularly tedious sort of death) and Altair came like a streak of white (a _pure_ angel to compliment the devil, no doubt) and left nothing but bodies in his wake. When Malik’s accusers were dead, Altair freed him from the chains that held him with a dirty frown on his face. There was blood on his hands when he grabbed Malik by the jaw and pulled him forward into a filthy kiss. It happened like that, Altair in white and Malik in black, and the litter of bodies growing cold at their feet.

But it was Kan’s voice flat and sure that haunted Malik long after the other petty insults slid away. Kan’s face that stuck in the back of his head, the rich roundness of his mouth and the freckled darkness of his long-long arms that never-let-him-be. It was Kan, sitting on a throne made by ignorant and willing _slaves_ that said, “let _it_ speak if _it_ wishes.” He was speaking to the men that broke Malik’s arms and his legs just to drop him to his knees. He spoke to the women who had cut the tendons in his elbows and laced his arms so tight against his back his shoulders seemed to be permanently caught between healing-and-fresh dislocation. His voice was loud-and-imminent over his gathering flock and his wide-wide hand was smoothing through the ruffled hair of the first-human-child (ever born) as he smiled at Malik with such contempt. “Has it forgotten how to speak?” Malik said-nothing-at-all to the man who had once whispered exalted praise into his ear. He bit his cheeks and his tongues but he did not go easily into death even as the precious-little-fools did the bidding of their tyrant king.

\--

That was long-ago-now. Malik was not a child the way he had once been. He was not free in the world but caught in a small squared room. The universe that was once his to explore had shrunk into the confines of this single room and the singular human that he had been given. 

Desmond was sitting at his side, his pale-and-pinked skin going rough with gooseflesh as the cold spread and thickened around him. The fragile bones of his spine rose prominently with the resigned slouch of his body as he conservatively chewed his way through a ration of the food he’d been given. The bruises, scrapes and cuts across his body had not had time to age but existed in a current state of highest aggravation. His face and neck bore the worst of the visible injury but Malik (and others) had not been kind to any part of him and the faint ache of those unseen injuries shifted his posture just enough to make it known where his tender places were. The matter of his broken finger was gummy-old-tape over a blackened bruise and a unhappy twitch of Desmond’s eyebrows whenever he put too much pressure on the bone.

It was a clean break; Malik had made sure of it. 

“Is he almost here?” Desmond asked when the chill made him shiver in a way he could no longer ignore.

Malik turned the boy’s face to look at him—thought again (not at all for the first time) how eerily similar Desmond’s face was to Altair’s. He thought again of how stupid the boy was (and how clever, when it mattered) as he kissed him. It was not the sort of kiss Malik was fond of giving mortals. It was a private-naked-thing that Altair had pulled from him through repeated attempts. It served as an adequate, if sorely unwelcome, apology for this final insult Malik intended to commit on Desmond’s weary body. 

The boy did not even have the energy (or maybe the resolve) to fight him when Malik slid his arm around Desmond’s neck. It was a simple matter of applying the correct pressure and waiting as Desmond’s basic-instinct-to-survive gave way to unconsciousness. He laid Desmond out across the softest of the old rugs and pulled the thickest from the edge of the heap to cover his body. The shuddering-softness of Desmond’s breath was poor company in the dark.

Altair was closer-now than he had been before. He was close enough to feel. The ticklish-feeling in Malik’s belly was a gentle inquisition, perhaps a request for direction, so Malik drew a breath in through his nose, crossed his legs and rested his hands on his knees.

“It is only fair I answer your final question, Desmond,” Malik said. “You asked if I had ever done anything I regretted.”

\--

It happened at Masyaf, with Altair at his door. Malik-was-soulless (then), a sheep sneaking in among wolves that meant to murder him. Altair was a clueless child; naïve and ignorant and so terribly headstrong. The Assassins named him their leader in the wake of Al Mualim’s death and they followed him with terrible loyalty.

Altair said, “I want to take Maria as my wife.”

Malik said, “give me your heart.”

Because Malik-was-a-monster who had been a plague on the earth far longer than Altair-could-remember. In the long years of the life he’d lived without the comfort of his other, he had dissected every member of their kind he could find. He had toyed-with-them and he had slaughtered-them and there was no secret still contained in their immortal bodies he had not already bloodily removed. 

Altair did not ask him why he made a demand. He bared his chest and felt for the spaces between his ribs until he was sure he’d found the one that would grant him easiest access to his own heart. 

Malik stood as a mirror to him, cut into his own chest as Altair did. He broke his ribs when they got in the way and felt around in the wet-red interior of his body until he closed his fist on the meaty pulse of his heart. “You have to put it in my chest,” Malik said to him. “Quickly.”

Altair did not ask him why but pulled his own heart out and shoved it into Malik’s chest even as Malik shoved his own into Altair. The pain was—only for a fraction of a breath—the most terrifying and severe pain that Malik had ever felt. A draining-whiteness pulled color out of his vision and left his fingers blue-and-cold and every muscle in his body sudden rigid-and-leaden. His dry lips parted in a sound not so very unlike a small animal that had just been suddenly struck. 

But the horror on Altair’s face—the frantic-black-fear that ran like slick-drool on his chin and tears in the corners of his eyes—was infinitely worse than the momentary physical sensation of _dying_. (Truly, and completely dying, an experience that was far-and-away unlike the momentary deaths he had experienced before.) Altair’s free hand clenched around Malik’s half-healed arm and his whole body sagged forward against Malik. The stretch of his torn skin around Malik’s wrist shredded apart with the motion. His eyes closed and his body shivered helplessly. “What have you done?” Altair said. His own hand pulled free from Malik’s body and the wound closed over as Altair’s heart fearsome-and-strong started pounding against the inside of Malik’s ribs. 

It took half-a-second too long to get his own hands to release his heart inside of Altair’s body. He had to rip the skin open again to free his hand. His eyes closed as his face pressed against Altair’s. He meant to answer Altair, to tell him about the sort of monster Malik really was, to lay the list of his crimes out for inspection and to name the many enemies that would now be hunting for them. He meant to tell Altair that he had made them immortal in a way that could-never-be-undone but his tongue was numb and his breath was short.

It did not need to be said directly. Altair knew it the way he knew many things that Malik did not.

\--

In his small box, in this present time, Malik’s voice had given away to silence. Desmond’s breath was a steady muffled sound beneath the rug behind him. The growing fire in Malik’s gut was spreading through his body like a true sense of _living_ that was long absent in the dark days when he could not reach out for Altair.

“Open the door, children,” Malik said into the air. Because it felt like he _should_. “Do not be rude to our guest.” 

Somewhere, high above him, Altair was waiting to be admitted. His quiet rage was an unmatched force (even in this modern age). They would tear at him with their modern weapons—guns—until they’d exhausted their supplies and he would not falter. Perhaps Lucy-the-traitor had a knife made of Malik’s bones, perhaps she had figured out how to use it against Altair. But it would not matter, it was the last secret Malik had not spoken into the ears of these dead men.

\--

“Here,” Malik had said once, when they were both soulless. He put the knife he’d made of Altair’s bone into Altair’s hand and pulled his shirt to the side to bare the ugly-pink-scar that twisted down his chest just over his heart. “It has to cut through the heart or it will not work.”

“You think I would not kill you?” Altair said. 

“I think you would gladly try. You cannot, that is what this will prove,” Malik said. So he nodded and Altair bared his teeth as he drove the blade through Malik’s chest. It was a seizure of pain—sharp-and-sudden—but there was no draining sensation of true death. Altair was gasping-gasping-gasping for breath as his fingers tightened reflexively on the hilt of the bone-knife but it was Malik who had to tighten his fist around Altair’s fist to pull the blade free again. 

Altair was on his knees, gasping for air as if it had been suddenly sucked out of his lungs. His fingers were spread out seeking purchase and sweat covered his face-and-neck and soaked through his hair so it was flat against his scalp. Malik set the bone knife to the side and plucked another from the belt around Altair’s waist. He slipped it between Altair’s ribs and struck his heart.

Altair’s eyes focused again, looked right at him as if he’d only just seen him for the very first time. “It was you,” Altair said. “You sang me to sleep in the dark. I heard you.”

It was years-and-years before Altair told Malik of the crushing weight of the water. Years-and-years before he could speak of the little he did remember of the water that filled his lungs and the blackness that was so immense and so complete that he had forgotten what his own body looked like. And years-later-still before Altair told him the very last first thing he remembered (before he woke up on the shore), the sound of a voice singing and the feeling of fear finally abating. 

But Malik was soulless when he drove a knife into Altair’s heart, he was soulless when Altair looked at him with such hope. He said, “you have a weak heart.”

Altair said, “because it is yours.” Then he shoved away from him and did not return.


	15. Chapter 15

Altair hit the ground with an echoing metallic clang, one arm out to the side with the sword gripped tight with his bloody fist. There were holes in his chest and holes in his arm and the squirming-sensation of a bullet caught somewhere in the left side of his neck that was slowly-being-pushed out again. These stupid little mortals caught in their half-crouches must have _known_ the bullets would be useless against him and yet they were struck silent with fearful awe.

His hood had been blow backward by one well-aimed bullet that had left a jagged-wet-streak across his right cheek and neatly clipped the top of his ear away entirely. The room smelled like his blood—coppery and old—with the acrid burn of recently fired handguns. The little whirls of smoke were still caught between the barrels of the guns and the low hang of the ceiling. Altair plucked the stubborn bullet out of his collarbone and dropped it to the side before he reached back to pull his hood over the top of his head again.

“Keep shooting him,” the woman-in-white said. 

\--

Malik had once named the dual sensation of existing in two bodies simultaneously as ‘transference’. But that was a name from centuries ago when the abstract notion of phantom sensations and intuitive reactions was something he had only been able to observe (and not feel). The name seemed inadequate to describe what it felt like to know that Altair had been hurt by the mortals, to know where the injury was the most dire and that he was amused-not-angry about the hail of (gunfire, of course, the mortals and their guns). 

“Keep that one alive,” Malik whispered into the air. He could not hear Altair’s thoughts, he could not see what Altair saw but all the same he _knew_ the moment his other looked at Lucy. He knew it as certainly as if he stood at Altair’s side. “Kill the rest and bring the woman to me.”

\--

Altair took a step forward and a fresh volley of bullets made a feeble attempt to hold him at bay. The shock of being struck and cut and invaded stuttered his footsteps only long enough for the steadying assurance of (Malik, his soul) to steal away all sensation of pain. What remained was an unwelcome pressure as the bullets connected. 

It was a simple matter to use a small dagger in his left hand to slit one man’s throat even as the barrel of the gun he held pressed tight to Altair’s chest. The ricochet of the metal in his chest tickled against the inside of ribs as he turned in a tight circle to cleave his sword into the unprotected side of another man’s chest. 

Someone shrieked—not the man split open along the sharpened edge of the sword—but someone behind him. There was a clatter of guns falling and a cheerful panic of feet scattering in different directions. These precious little mole-like-men had been told about-but-had-not seen the thing that Altair was. 

He pulled his sword free from a wheezing man’s side and turned to watch them run.

\--

Malik let a sigh out of his nose. “They all _die_.”

\--

It was a simple matter of gathering them in groups of one-and-two. Their useless guns popping like firecrackers as he gutted one and turned to stab another in the heart. He shot one—for the novelty of it—and hit the red button on the control panel that closed the hatch over their head. The sudden blackness sent them into a fresh state of panic. Green-tinged lights flickered on over their heads with a distracting buzz. 

The woman in white was there with wet-bared-teeth and two hands on the hilt of the bone knife. The Templars had even gone so far as to etch the black outline of half a bird into the shaft of bone the way Malik had done with all of the bones he’d collected from the soul mates he’d killed. The point dug through the space between his ribs and slashed into the tough flesh of his heart. 

The woman loosened her grip on the hilt, eyes wide-and-dilated, cheeks pinked with effort and sweat slick down her temples and in her blonde-blonde hair. For a second a sense of accomplishment quirked her lips at the edges.

\--

Malik went limp as the world went black all around him. Everything was (all at once) in-and-out of focus. In the distance it felt as if every muscle in his body had suddenly seized up as tight as it could manage and then relaxed in unison. 

Then it was gone and the dark little square he had been kept prisoner in came back into perfect clarity. The smell of the smashed dates, the outline of the broken pieces of his furniture and the sound of Desmond’s worried, sleeping breath. Malik sat up again and stretched the residual ache out of his neck.

\--

Altair turned at the stumbling sound to his left and threw a slim-silver-knife toward the sound. A man’s voice caught in sudden alarm and then gurgled wetly to the ground. Only two men had managed to escape the tight little room they were left standing in, running full tilt into the confusing twist of tunnel-like hallways beyond the entrance. 

“How do I lock this door?” Altair said. He pulled the knife out of his chest and tucked it into a spare loop on his belt. 

“That should have killed you!” the woman screamed. She pulled a gun from a holster on her side and aimed it at him. Altair considered letting her shoot him and put his hand over the gun and slammed it into her nose instead. The instant red fount of blood was almost more satisfying to him than the pile of bodies groaning quietly into death. But the woman did not appreciate it so much as he did. She threw the gun to the side and pulled the bone knife out of his belt before she turned it in her hand and hit him in the face with the blunt metal hilt.

\--

“I promised her death to Desmond,” Malik said.

\--

Altair caught her wrist before she could turn it around, twisted her arm so sharply she was forced to relinquish her grip on the knife and then released her. “Take me to Desmond,” Altair said. 

To her credit, the woman did not protest ignorance. She did not look amazed that Altair would know the name or that the boy was being kept here. The woman wiped the back of her hand across the smear of blood draining out of her nose and glanced around for any living ally. “If I refuse?”

“I was asked only to deliver you alive. The condition you are in is irrelevant so long as your heart is still beating.”

But it was not fear that moved the woman’s body into action. She gave with an arrogant turn and motioned him after her the way a mother called a disobedient child.

\--

“She’s a traitor and a liar,” Malik said. He had not been out of this square of space in fifty years, since the walls and the floors and the ceiling of the Vault were still fresh and new. The unsettling feeling of being misled was a heavy weight over his shoulders. Lucy could (and would) lead Altair through the endless maze of hallways until her heart gave out. 

If Malik were only concerned for his own well-being the short delay while Altair navigated the confusion levels of this hellhole would have been an easy if inconvenient wait. But the air around him was colder and the room had gone black without electricity for the light above his head. Desmond’s tiny breathing was not so strong it could withstand Lucy’s final act of spite. 

“Desmond,” Malik said. He crept across the floor on hands-and-knees and poked the man until he stirred into wakefulness again. “Do you remember the path to this room?”

Desmond’s voice was a confusion of anger-and-exhaustion. “Six blinks to ten steps,” Desmond said. He rubbed his hand over his face and tugged the carpet covering him tighter around his shoulders. “Does he know about your fetish for strangulation?”

“It is a useful tool, not a fetish. Be quiet or I will do it again.” Then he sat up straight again. 

\--

The hallways were precisely the same length, each of them feeding off in four ways toward a blinking light. Altair stood in the center of one, looked forward-backward-left-right even as the woman in white tried to lead him down toward an erratic flicker of light. “You are outmatched, mortal,” Altair said. “The man you have kept in this prison once waged a war against Gods. Your meager means of deception are ineffective and unamusing.”

“I won’t lead you to my own death,” the woman (Lucy) snapped at him.

Altair felt a rush of white-hot-rage that not uncommon for Malik to feel save for the bitter intensity of it. Malik did not hate this woman in the way he had hated Altair’s wives or the foolish men that had fallen to him. He hated her in equal measures of soulless delight in murder and soulful disgust. “Then I will lead you as you led Desmond.” He grabbed her hair when she did not move and pulled her on in wild protest.

\--

“Lucy was an Assassin once,” Malik said (not to Altair who surely knew it). Anxiety was welling up in his gut, the need to move was stronger now than it had ever been. Freedom (so long denied him, so long unwanted) was no longer a passing inclination but a bodily demand. “Assassins are trained the same, all of them—all throughout the world—they move in such a specific way. There is an economy of motion and an arrogant presumption of power. He is bringing her to you, Desmond. That was our deal.”

\--

At the end of the last sloping hallway there were massive doors that opened into a disorienting white light. The floors-and-walls-and-ceiling were glossy white with lights set into every corner of the four halls surrounding the narrow box Malik was contained within. A faint pink streak was the only bit of color in the whole of the space.

“A door,” Altair said. He pulled Lucy toward it. He stared at the door—hardly even a door worth taking note of—and said, “a door!” It took minimal effort to knock the door out of its track and it wrenched inward with a crippling scream. Malik was standing on the inside, far enough away to escape any impulsive strike Altair might have made. “A door!” he yelled at him. “You have been held captive by a poor labyrinth and a single door for these many years?”

Malik shrugged. He caught the edge of the broken door with one hand and pulled it farther open with one fluid motion of his body. Behind him, the skinny-beaten-shivering boy was creeping forward on bare feet. 

Desmond wore only a pair of threadbare cotton pants and the many fresh wounds of captivity. There was the crest of the Assassins tattooed into one of his arms to identify him as a brother even when unseen injuries threw off his gait. “Are you going to let me go now?” Desmond said. He was looking at Malik when he spoke, with one of his arms across his body and the other hanging at his side. 

“It is not in my nature to do so,” Malik said. He was close enough to take the bone knife from Altair’s belt and held it out to Desmond. 

\--

Malik had watched mortal men grow from unwanted parasites in the camps of so many immortals to a powerful force that overwhelmed the face of the planet. He had watched the faces of countless men in that fractional span of seconds between the thought of violence and the hardened resolve to commit it. 

Desmond reached out to take the knife from him with slippery-fingers and an uncertain laxness to his jaw. He wanted Lucy dead (of that there was no doubt) but the man he’d been in those days before he found himself _here_ was not a killer. It was the grip of his fist around the cool metal hilt of the knife and the strangest look of sadness on his face that mutated that nonspecific _want_ into an achievable _need_. “You brought her to me?” he said to Malik.

Lucy stood her ground, at least, looked right at Desmond when he finally looked at her. There were no tears in her eyes, no last slobbering attempts at apology or hiccupped pleas for her life. She squared her shoulders and shook Altair’s grip off. 

Desmond put one hand on her shoulder with a tenderness that only the newest of killers felt. His fingers tightened and loosened as he looked at the knife and the blood already on it (but not at her). There was a dark chuckle in his voice (that broke and cracked) when he said, “real Assassins don’t give an inch, huh?”

Lucy opened her mouth to retort but Desmond drove the knife into the soft flesh beneath her ribs and up into her fragile lungs. Pain-and-sudden-shock bowed her body forward and her pale-white-hands were grasping at his forearms as her head fell forward and her blonde-blonde hair covered her face. Desmond pulled his hand back, tore the knife out of her in such a way that made a half-voiced scream rattle free from her throat before she fell forward on her knees.


	16. Chapter 16

Things did not make sense, really. Desmond knew he was standing between two soul mates. He was aware of the heated-hatred in Altair’s impassive face that was almost as intense and as dangerous as the cool indifference in Malik’s gaze. The acute lack of safety was as obvious to him as the blood spreading out under his bare feet and the brief, feeble, lax grip of Lucy’s cold fingers at his ankle. 

Desmond could feel the knife in his hand.

It was only that none of it seemed to make any sense at all.

\--

They walked. Malik at his back pushing Desmond forward with one hand between his shoulder blades and a quiet, unquestioning patience. Altair in front of him with his whole body swaying with the motion of his hips. The long tails of his whatever the hell he called it were swishing around his legs like layers of a soft-silky-skirt. There were burnt and bloody round holes here and there but perfectly pink skin beneath them. 

It was halfway up (maybe more, maybe less) when the lights stopped blinking and the already dark halls plunged into complete and utter blackness. Somewhere far above their heads a great metallic wrenching sound shook through the walls. Altair’s voice was a sigh but Malik at his back said, “sloppy work.”

“Sloppy?” Altair repeated. His body slipped past Desmond without touching him. The ghost of displaced air rose goosebumps on the backs of his arms. Then one-struck-the-other behind him. (Or to the side, there was no way to know in the blackness.) Malik’s voice was caught in a mirthless laugh, that smoky sound of soulless amusement. The impact of flesh-against-flesh was brought to a jarring halt when one of them hit the wall. “Sloppy is fucking an impersonation.”

“What is the baby’s name?” Malik hissed back.

One-punched the other as the temperature in the hallway seemed to suddenly plummet. Desmond was blind-and-shaking and the immortal fools were fighting over bullshit. “Stop!” Desmond shouted at them. “I’m mortal.”

“You’ll be dead soon,” Altair said. Whether it was meant as reassurance or a threat was unclear from the tone of his voice. There was no sound of movement but that didn’t seem to matter because Desmond could feel the lurking closeness of Altair where he had not been before. 

“Desmond will not die here,” Malik said. 

“My child does not die,” Altair snapped back.

Malik’s sigh brought not reassurance. “Bring me the heart of the child’s mother and I won’t kill it. Desmond’s life is already mine. You will keep the promises you’ve already made.”

For a moment, there was no movement and no sound. Desmond’s breath was painful with chill and his body was shivering so hard he had to clench his jaw to keep from biting his own tongue. The hand that grabbed his arm was an unforgiving force that dragged him forward at a running pace. 

\--

The black hallways ended in a room filled with bodies. Malik blinked into the greenish light of the room and immediately fell into an easy crouch as he began unlacing a dead man’s boots. Altair was across the room from them, making short work of pulling clothes off a dead man’s resisting body. 

“Just a little light shopping?” Desmond said. 

“You’re mortal,” Altair said. He threw the heavy shirt at Desmond. It hit him with a damp slap before Altair pulled a short sword from the sheath on his back and left the room. Malik was rolling thick-black-socks off the dead man’s feet and wrinkling his nose up at the smell of them. He said, “it’s snowing outside. You wouldn’t survive the walk.”

The floor under his bare feet was cold and sticky. A man to his left looked as if he’d been nearly cut in two, the ragged split in his side spilling out a putrid wrinkle of intestines mixed up with the slimy gleaming meat of liver and kidney. Desmond looked down at his hand, at his white-knuckled fist and the bone knife that was still clenched there. His breath wasn’t soft and even anymore but jumping out of his throat as if he’d just run for miles as fast as he could. There was a stitch in his side and an acid burn caught just behind his eyes-and-his-throat. 

Malik was just there in front of him, rising up from the floor with his hands full of rolled-black-socks and a dead man’s sturdy boots. That residual grip of humanity that had made him seem oh-so-bearable before was absent now. Sympathy had turned into pithy amusement and it was all at once a great assault against Desmond’s pride than the many sorry aches on his body. “The woman deserved to die.”

“Let me go,” Desmond said.

The low-hum of noise that pitched out of Malik’s throat was as good an answer as any actual words might have been. As soon as Desmond heard the start of it he knew the request was the stupidest thing he’d ever said. This was where he’d thrown his lot—with this man. Desmond didn’t wait for the obvious refusal but shoved the knife against Malik’s chest and took the socks and boots from him. 

“You’ll need pants as well,” Malik said. But he didn’t turn away from where he stood over Desmond crouching against a wall to pull the socks on and shove his feet into the damp boots. He looked at him with his eyebrows knitted together and his mouth pulled between a sly smile and a frank-frown. “I will kill you, if that end seems favorable.”

Desmond shoved his left foot into the boot and stood up again. “I’ll let you know when being your whore is too tiring.” He shoved his arms back into the sleeves of the shirt Altair had given him. “This isn’t a two for one deal.”

Malik waved his hand like the idea was preposterous. “Altair prefers women.” Then he turned away and sorted through the bodies on the floor to find the least offensive pants that would fit the best. 

\--

Altair returned (eventually) with his weapons in sheathes and a thick black coat that he shoved at Desmond with no sense of actual kindness or concern. There was a reactive stiffness in his posture whenever he looked at Malik. After a moment of tense silence, Altair found a panel set into the wall and flipped a switch that set gears over their head grating one-against-the-other as the hatch to freedom opened. The sunlight was blinding and the bitter cold of fresh snow was numbing. 

Malik pushed him to go first and Desmond stumbled back out into freedom (in a matter of speaking) and found himself in the middle of a vast field of nothing. All around him, there was a blanket of wet snow with fluffy-white-flakes drifting drowsily downward all around him. The air smelled clean-and-fresh (so unlike the bloody filth of the world below) that he simply closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling of the cold burning through his nose and filling his lungs. 

“Walk,” Altair said. “It is not so long until sundown.”

\--

Altair swayed when he walked. Malik stalked. Desmond stumbled after the tracks of their footfalls until they reached a fence that hummed with electricity. Malik let out another of his derisive sighs. 

“Impatient,” he said.

“For once we agree—why should I have rushed to reunite with you? And why are you speaking English now, Malik? You have never bothered to speak it to me before. Did the boy move you to such useless pity?” Altair did not look at him when he spoke but motioned to the side where he expected Desmond to be standing. 

Malik’s retort was fast-and-scathing, spoken in a language that Desmond did not understand. The gist of it had to have been some insult or threat because they fell into fighting much the way they had back in the dark halls. Desmond stepped out of their way and went toward the thick pillars on either side of the gate. There was a box there that was easy enough to flip open but the inside was a confusing set of key holes and number pads. 

“Move,” Altair said. He pulled a series of keys out and punched his finger against the number keys. The gate opened with a lurch and a great shower of settled snow. Malik came up behind him with a bloody smile on his face. His skin—so much darker surrounded by the bright white snow—was rosy with fading bruises here-and-there. A slash across his collarbone was halfway to healing as his bare feet crunched through the snow. 

\--

They walked another mile, maybe two, before Altair turned around and grabbed Malik by the jaw to drag him forward. It was hardly the gesture of a lover, more like an assault than a caress but Malik went willingly. Malik’s arms were over Altair’s shoulders dragging him down the precious few inches in difference and Altair’s hands were scratching down Malik’s back. His fingers were pressing along the prominent bones of Malik’s spine and ribs as if he were checking for injuries. 

It was Malik that stumbled but they both fell, back-and-over so they hit the snow banked on the side of the so-called road with a nearly silent thump. Desmond turned his back and pulled his coat tighter around his body but there was nothing-at-all to distract him from the tear of cloth, the ragged breathing and the unmistakable sound of skin slapping together.

\--

Desmond walked (idly) because the alternative was standing three-foot-away pretending he didn’t hear the happy murderers rutting together like wild animals. There were no tracks in the snow and the feeling of being lost in an infinite white space. The trees at his left and right were bowing under the heavy cling of snow and the ground beneath him was crunchy at the top and slush underneath. He kicked at it as he dragged his feet and ignored the pink stain as the snow washed the drying blood off his boots.

There was the wicked-(seductive)-tingling notion of running for his life. The illusion of freedom was as painful as the heated wound at the back of his neck. Malik wouldn’t appreciate Desmond making a run for it (or maybe he would. Maybe he would respect it for what it was: the mad dash of desperation). 

Desmond didn’t hear Altair before the man was suddenly there pulling at the back of his coat and shoving him to the left. The man’s mouth was pinked-from irritation and his clothes were pulled askew. The stink of sex hung off him in a foggy cloud. “You have no sense of direction,” Altair said.

That-wasn’t-right because Desmond had always known exactly which way to go north-south-east-west. It wasn’t an actual sense of direction Altair meant when he said the words and even if he had meant it that way.

Malik fell into step behind them, unnaturally quiet and uncomfortably subordinate in his motion. It was Altair in-front of them, leading the way through the dense clutch of trees.

\--

They found themselves at the front door of a dreary little house set against the edge of the spread of trees. Desmond was freezing-cold, feeling literally-blue with both of his fists pulled inside the long sleeves of the coat and a persistent shiver to his jaw. His nose and cheeks and ears were brittle with cold-snapping-pain. 

“Assassins,” Malik said from just-behind-him.

Altair, in front of him, answered the question with a half-glance over his shoulder before he opened the door and let himself in. The front room was a sprawl of electronic equipment, a few tables heavy with computers and big black boxes that might have had some similar purpose. Against the far wall there was a couch, and two broad doorways—one that led to a smaller room with a table and the other that fed into a tight little alcove with a fireplace currently raging with bright orange flames. The upstairs was just a short-squat set of stairs tucked into the space between the two openings. 

Then there was Shaun with a bagel stuck in his mouth and a cup of tea steaming in his hand. His gun was a half-realized notion sitting on the table out of reach. Desmond let himself be pushed inside of the house because it was _warm_. Malik came after him, the door shut with civility. 

“Desmond,” Shaun said. He set the tea cup down but the bagel had fallen out of his mouth and lay face-down on the floor. He took a step forward and Altair put a hand up against his chest. The tight-knit of Shaun’s eyebrows was the precious confusion that Desmond really wished he could feel at this point. (No, he was just fucking cold.) “He’s hurt,” Shaun said.

“Most of the blood is not his,” Altair said.

Malik had moved past him. His fingers (recently blackened with frostbite) were touching the smooth keys and the screens of the computers. “This is what has become of the Assassin order? You were once men of decisive action.” Then he shook his head, “you have been negligent, Altair.”

“I gave them all I felt I needed to give,” Altair retorted. He moved his hand away from Shaun’s chest. “Perhaps you should have given the Templars less.”

“Though great in numbers, the Templars are poor in resolve. A single Assassin could easily topple their empire—history is full of proof of this.” Then he stepped up to Shaun, seemed vaguely offended to find he man taller than him. He did not pluck at the sweater Shaun wore but eyed it with the same derisive dislike before turning away from him. 

“Desmond,” Shaun said again.

“I need a shower,” Desmond said, “where’s the shower?” 

“Upstairs.”

Desmond nodded, turned to go around the tables and toward the stairs. He stopped with one cold hand against the smooth-warm-wood of the bannister. “Don’t kill anyone,” he said and he wasn’t even sure who he was talking to.

Malik was taking soft-slow-steps in a circle around Shaun. He said only, “I make no promises.”

Altair looked at Desmond, “Go. The Assassins are safe.” The way Malik had once said to him: _he does not take what is mine._


	17. Chapter 17

The shower was small, set into the back wall of the bathroom with a terribly placed, awkward window made of solid hazy glass blocks. The grout between the tiles was grayed with age and the water spewed out of the antique (or so it looked to him) shower head with a rattle and crank. The water was warm, sometimes hot, and that seemed like the most merciful grace of God he had ever witnessed. 

There was nobody to see him—no Hammond, no Lucy, no Malik—to watch his knees collapse out from under him and his back drag down the wall. There were no unseen surveillance bugs to hear the hitch of his breath. There was nothing-and-nobody in the world except for him and his battered body. When the shivering gave way to hitching-little-aches in his lungs he didn’t have the energy left to fight back the impulse to cry. 

\--

The sanctuary did not protect him for long. The bathroom door opened shortly after he’d managed to calm his breathing and compel his body back to standing upright (a task far more difficult that he’d like to think over). Desmond had never been overwhelmed with bravery before—resplendent with foolhardy stupidity at times but never brave. The shower curtain was yanked open and Desmond steeled himself against the inevitable and expecting Malik, was struck momentarily defenseless to find Altair instead. 

“No,” Desmond said. 

“I harbor no physical desire for you.” Funny how he could say that when his own face was so nearly identical to Desmond’s. (Funny how that quirk of genetics had worked out.) His eyes were different, more clear and brighter (perhaps) and his jaw was ever so slightly more square. The fullness of his lips more pronounced with that scowl on his face. His body was filled with muscle, pocked here and there with protruding little black dots blossoming up with red bruises. “Malik is momentarily amused by the scholar and there are things I want to ask you.”

“While naked, in the shower?” Desmond said.

Altair pulled the curtain closed after he stepped into the tub. “It is expedient. I need a shower and this provides an excellent excuse when Malik inevitably asks.” He motioned toward the fall of water and Desmond slid against the wall as best he could so they wouldn’t touch when they switched places. The water that washed off Altair was pink-and-black. His hands scrubbed at his own skin where the dirt and crusted blood stuck tight. For a moment he stood there with his fingers spread around one of those bulging red pockets. 

“Are those bullets?” Desmond asked.

“Yes. They were deep but they did not go through. The skin and flesh has regrown to cover the wound but the internal damage healed slower.” He moved out of the water and motioned Desmond back under it. 

“Will your body push them out eventually?”

“No. My skin is thick and strong. Malik will cut them out later. It seems to offer him some combination of amusement and satisfaction. Why are you here?” Asked the immortal man who had come to rescue (Malik and) him. The one who ‘preferred women’ but had still managed to find his way up into Desmond’s shower. Altair made a brief, annoyed face at him and crossed his arms over his chest. “I am not the same as my other, Desmond. I will not use you for my own gratification.” He motioned at Desmond’s throat. “He strangled you,” then at his face, “he suffocated you,” and then at his side, “and hit you when you resisted. He broke your finger and he humiliated you for his own benefit. All this, I am certain, before he made use of your body.”

Desmond was warm under the water (and safe nowhere in the world). He crossed his arms to mirror Altair’s stance and said, “but I’m alive. That’s a better outcome than the one Lucy had planned for me.”

“It’s curious. The others he’s taken for similar purposes, they did not know the monster he was when they met him. Malik can be—when necessary—quite charming. Even without his soul, there is a certain attractiveness to him that brings willing victims into his grasp. They find out later what he truly is and they try for freedom. You know what he is—or close enough—and you aligned yourself with him regardless.”

“Was there a question?” Desmond asked.

Altair sighed. “What is your deal with him?”

“What is yours?”

“In exchange for my freedom from him during the years between our souls joining, I am obliged to free him from any confinement the mortals attempt to subject him to. In exchange for taking Maria as my wife, I gave him my heart. In exchange for the safety of the many Assassin brothers I abandoned, I promised never to harm what he has claimed as his own. There are more, of course. Most of our deals have not held fast over the years. They were momentary.”

The water was growing tepid and the lack of heat was as good as the brittle chill beyond the windows. Desmond turned the water off and pulled down the towel he’d thrown over the top of the shower. “Every day he gave me a task and if I chose to do it, I was allowed to ask a question.”

Altair seemed so-fucking-pleased to hear that. He stepped up close enough that the towel was the only thing keeping them from slipping together skin-on-skin. “Do what he asks tomorrow and when it is your turn to ask him a question, ask him why he has to kill my wife and my children.”

“Because he’s jealous,” Desmond said.

Altair scoffed at him. “We were never meant to be lovers. It was a decision I made, one I meant to pull us closer together. He thrives on physical touch, Desmond. That he sought you out and used you the way he did proves that my work has not been in vain. Whatever else you have learned, the depth of things you still do not know is immense. Ask him why he kills my wives and my children.”

Desmond had no room to move away but Altair did. He stepped back a half-step. Desmond said, “do you already know the answer?”

“I know he kills my wife and allows me to kill him—however momentarily—and hides from me until he cannot stand the isolation and we are whole again. It has never happened without the blood of my wives spilled first.”

“Fine,” Desmond said. “Get out.”

Altair went, at least, without protest.

\--

Shaun provided him clothes that fit poorly but were heavenly against his skin. There was fresh-hot-food and much-needed painkillers. Then there was a bed free from glittering-black-bugs and the interminable blackness of the Vault. 

Desmond slept with the light on. 

\--

Malik was there when he woke up again. He was dressed in black, black pants and a black shirt and a black vest that clung to the tight curves of his body. He was sitting oh-so-patiently on a chair at the end of the bed watching Desmond sleep with all of the presumptive ownership in the world.

“Altair brought you clothes,” Malik said. He motioned to a pile of things sitting by the door. 

“Are you always going to watch me sleep?” Desmond asked.

“I was not here most of the night. I removed bullets from Altair’s body. I annoyed the scholar and offended the woman assassin. I saw a movie on the TV. I went with Altair when he went to find clothes.” 

Desmond sat up on the bed, crossed his legs under the blankets and rubbed at his sleep-dried eyes. “So tell me what it is. Tell me what you want—suffocation? Broken rib? Physical labor? Hey, you haven’t hit me in a day or so.”

Malik stood up, stepped forward and put is knee on the bed. He shuffled forward on his knees, crept until his legs were pressed against Desmond’s and his hand was against Desmond’s shoulder. His weight pushed Desmond steadily backward into the bed. “I have been violently, bloodily _fucked_ by the only man in this world as vicious and soulless as I. I have cut him open and pulled out his insides. I have enjoyed the comforting silence of mutual hatred with him. There is nothing your body can offer me that would satisfy the bloodlust you correctly attribute to me.” But there he was anyway, thighs spread open around Desmond’s waist with the ghost of his weight hovering above his hips. His slim body bent forward. In the light of the room—warm and golden—his skin seemed darker than it had before and his face seemed far younger.

“I guess I just don’t believe your appetite can be so easily satiated,” Desmond said. He did not relax in place (exactly) but go defensively limp. Malik always seemed pleased by that, how easily Desmond folded to his desires in direct contrast to the protest growing cold on his lips. “I’ve got to say I’d rather get hit than have you fuck me.”

“Are you worried what the other Assassins will think of you? You shouldn’t be. The woman would gladly kill in your name and the scholar harbors a justified guilt that he was the one that led the Templars to you. You are not a victim in their eyes but a survivor.”

Desmond shifted on the bed, bent his knees to get more comfortable and rested his hands (unhappily) against the smooth-warm pants stretched across Malik’s muscular thighs. “But they won’t think that if you fuck me.”

Malik smiled—bright-and-white-and-pleased. “Cry,” he said. He was close enough the word was a breeze of warmth on Desmond’s face. “That is what I want from you today. It fascinates me.”

“Cry,” Desmond repeated.

“Mortals cry when they are under stress, when they cannot cope with their extreme emotions, and when they have been hurt. You killed a woman yesterday, you have given up your freedom and your body in an attempt to save your life. You are now faced with the fact that you are little more than my slave until the day when you can no longer stand it. If that does not move you to tears I could easily provide physical stimulus. The wound on your neck is tender still as is the memory of the animal’s hands on your body.”

“Stop,” Desmond said. 

Malik shifted his weight back. “Yes, like that.”

Desmond gave again, the way he had in the dark.

\--

But after, when he was exhausted and Malik was sitting quietly on the bed next to him with his legs crossed and his face caught in some unnamable emotion between curious approval and human pain, the monster wiped the wetness off his cheeks. “They are right to consider you a survivor Desmond.”

“Go away,” Desmond said.

“Yes,” Malik said. “Find me when you’ve composed yourself.”

\--

Desmond took another shower, dressed in the clothes that Altair brought him, snuck down the stairs and found something he wanted to eat before creeping back to the suggested safety of the room he was given. He ate and slept again (with the light on) and woke up to find the room blissfully empty.

For a moment (or two, or three, or half an hour) he sat with his feet against the floor and his hands in his hair at the side of the bed. He was weighing the intelligence of getting in the middle of an immortal piss-fight by asking the question Altair had told him to ask. Whatever drove Malik to kill every woman Altair had ever played house with seemed like the sort of dark thing that Desmond wanted to stay the hell away from. 

And yet—and _yet_.

\--

It was not Malik that Desmond went looking for. Altair was in the tiny back room of the house where the cold was as bitter and white as the world beyond the poorly insulated windows. He was sitting with his back against the door and a spread of two dozen books all around him. His clothes were loose jeans and a T-shirt with a hoodie-half-zipped over it. Given no other details about the man he might have assumed Altair was a college kid. Certainly not the cold-blooded killer he had been the day before.

“He won’t like what you’re sending me to ask him,” Desmond said.

“No, he won’t,” Altair replied. He did not look up from the book he was reading (some trash romance novel going by the embossed title and big-breasted woman on the cover. When the man reached a pausing point he set it aside and turned his full attention on Desmond with the slightest sigh of annoyance. “If you do ask him, you will be easily risking further physical harm. I imagine, the honesty that he promised you will move him to the most volatile sense of instability he has felt since we happened across one another.”

“Why the hell should I do it, then?” Not because Desmond was afraid (but he was). But because he was not going to risk his life on the selfish whims of others (again, so soon). “You know something, or you think you know something. Why don’t you ask him?”

Altair did not stand but tipped his head so it was pressed against the wooden door. “I hate the thing I am, and in turn I hate the thing Malik is. I have spent these centuries of my life in constant search of a way to cure what my absence has done to him. My journey has taken me in many directions, searching through ruins and myths for answers to what we are and what was done to us. I found nothing in the rubble of ancient things. It was in him that I found the first of many answers. His voice that sang to me as the world went black and the only thing I could feel was terrible fear. I thought it was a memory of the water—but it is far older.” Then he straightened, leaned away from the door and set his elbows against his knees. “Malik and I waged a war against tyrant gods that enslaved our kind. We led a rebellion in the open slaughter of many of their number. I remember this and he does not. He remembers terrible pain and waking up in the world where he was only half. I do not remember how we were tore apart but I remember the moment directly before with his voice in my ear singing to me. I thought it was fear that made his voice waver but I know now that it is not.”

“Guilt,” Desmond said.

Altair nodded. “Malik is driven by a need for vengeance that even he cannot explain. I can only guess that, perhaps, one of our kind told the Gods of what we’d planned and that it was us that had planned it. It is only a thought but it quite tidily explains why Malik has hunted, tortured and murdered every person of our kind.”

“So what good does asking him why he kills your wife do?”

“Malik must feel guilt to feel our soul. I must feel rage—uncontrollable rage and blame settled squarely on his shoulders. And then we find comfort in one another, and he sings to me. But we cannot sustain this because just as guilt brings us together, it tears us apart again.” Altair drew in a breath and let go again. “I do not know why he feels guilt, I cannot remember. But if he tried—if he had to try—he would know.”

Desmond rubbed at the sore wound on the back of his neck and then licked his lips and nodded his head. “Yeah, well, if you hear him throwing me across the room, come stop him.”

Altair nodded. Then, when Desmond had turned to go cleared his throat to say, “thank you, Desmond.”


	18. Chapter 18

There was a definite art to accepting the intermittent intensity of emotions when they came like bile-coated hiccups. Malik hated the process, that sudden awareness of how hollow he was followed by the tentative little touch of jealousy and happiness and _want_. It was far easier to feel nothing at all, to remain blank and hollow, but he grit his teeth against the burning sensation that rose form his chest to gather in knots in his throat and just behind his face. The unsanitary wetness of sorrow was his least favorite of things.

But it came and he let it take him. He had gotten very good at that, being still and allowing it to happen.

\--

The scholar was fascinated-by and revolted-by him. Malik was all at once pleased and annoyed by this combination of emotions. Shaun (so he called himself) was one of the few among the Assassins not to hate him on sight. They all seemed to know (even without knowing) that he was responsible for their creation and the subsequent death of their souls. Those days were long-ago now. That first man and his brothers that Malik had turned into killers had wept for their dying souls as they perfected the art of death. 

Every Assassin knew the cost of their mission. Every Assassin convinced themselves that collective sum of humans were worth more than the comfort of their own souls. 

“The King of Swords,” Shaun said to him.

“Yes, the Templars are fond of calling me such. I have kept the name for centuries but it is not what I have most commonly been called.”

“What were you called?”

“Monster,” Malik said. “Devil. Demon. They were not wrong. My proficiency with a sword is hardly the most remarkable thing about me. Yet, it does have a certain ring to it.”

“Yes, I suppose it does.” Shaun was careful with his questions. He asked only the ones he felt he could accept the answers to and excused himself to attend to his work at predictable intervals. Mortals often did that, looked him in the face until they could not stand the blankness they saw and then shrank away. 

\--

But there was Desmond, shuffling up on bare feet and too-long pants, wearing a jacket Malik did not remember being left for him. His hands were pushed into his pockets as he took a moment to be indecisive about putting himself so close to a fire and the wrought-iron tools to tend to it. In the end he settled into the large arm chair opposite Malik and pulled one of his legs up to tuck a foot under his knee. His body was still tender where it had been hurt but it was not so heavy with pain as it had been only the day before. 

“Have you thought of your question?” Malik asked. His chair was turned to look into the fire (Malik hated fire, detested the human reliance on it for light-and-heat). He did not look at Desmond and the reluctance could not have gone unnoticed. 

“Why do you have to kill Altair’s wife and children?” Desmond said.

(No.) Malik sneered at the question and at the man who had not come to ask it himself. (That was not a fair anger. Altair had asked him before, again-and-again when they were soulless and when they were not. He had bled his throat raw with the asking of the question and never gotten an answer that satisfied him.) “I would advise against trading one tyrannical master for another, Desmond. Altair only seems fair and even tempered.”

“I did what you asked, you have to answer my question.”

Malik did look at him then, saw how his hands were in fists inside of his pockets and how his whole body was leaning into a mad dash for freedom. The obvious expectation of violence brought a sense of annoyance to the forefront of Malik’s stormy accumulation of emotions. “Yes, that is what we agreed on. I kill them because they are temporary and useless. If he cared about their lives at all he would not allow them to die. Do not let him mislead you into believing otherwise.”

“No,” Desmond said, “not why do you think you do it. Why do you _have_ to do it?”

“I do not _have_ to, I choose to.”

“That’s not true.” Desmond said the words as if he had known them for the entirety of his life. But they were the words of the other man that shared his face. “You have to kill them. You don’t have a choice. Why?”

\--

Last night, Altair had brought him a knife and a grim frown. Malik had still be dressed in the clothes he’d escaped in—still ripped, still stained with dirt, blood and semen—sitting out on the porch. He’d forgotten (in the many years of isolation and captivity) the feeling of peace being outside had always brought him. It was walls and doors and ceilings that made him feel trapped. But the moonlight across the snow brought him a sense of peace that fifty years of meditation and self-reflection had not.

Without a word, Altair turned his body to show the swollen pockets of blood where the bullets that had not been expelled quick enough pressed obscenely against his stretched-thin skin. Given long enough—months, years perhaps—the bullets would worked their way through Altair’s skin. Instead he arched his body to give Malik the easiest access to the many red bulges. 

For a moment they worked in peaceful silence. Malik dragging the blade in neat circles to free the trapped blood and the misshapen metal slug. They hit the porch with heavy punches of sound. Altair’s hand touched his shoulder and Malik licked one of the streaks of blood from the coarse hairs just beneath his belly button. 

“If I kill its mother, I would not abandon the baby to the mercy of the well-meaning mortals.” 

The next cut was deeper than necessary, the blood flowed fresh-and-thick from the wound even after the bullet had been successful expelled. “Are you asking if I would rear your bastard offspring?”

“I am asking if you _want_ to.” His hand was threading through Malik’s hair. His stomach and chest was a series of pitted bleeding craters that would have reduced any man to a quivering point of pain but Altair stood and spoke as if he could not feel it. (A lie, Altair was fully capable of feeling pain. Perhaps incapable of attributing the appropriate amount of concern for the feeling.) 

Malik slipped the knife into his flesh, angled it to push against the bullet and then twisted it in a circle. The hole he left in Altair’s belly was as big around a quarter and an inch-at-least deep. “I would raise it; I do not think it is the same as wanting it.”

Altair’s hand slid under his jaw and pulled him upward. This kiss—so different from the one before—was a sweet-tasting reward. Altair’s arm around his back was an embrace, not an assault, and the eager push of his damp-skin was an invitation but not a demand.

\--

But here-and-now, the room with the fire cracking and Desmond’s brave-faced fear, Malik sighed. This was not the first time Altair had arranged events to reach a desired goal. The man, for all of his absolute resolve toward nonviolence when possible, was as crafty and ruthless as Malik. 

“I don’t know,” Malik said. 

Desmond’s face broke in exaggerated mirth but the sound he made was not quite a laugh. His hands gripped the arms of the chair as he tipped forward. Both of his feet were on the floor. “There is something you do not know?”

“This question is surrounded by ignorance. You do not know why you are asking it and I do not have an answer for it. Even Altair, who put the words into your throat, does not know what he hopes to accomplish.” But there was a certain betrayal of intent in sending Desmond to him. Malik stood up and enjoyed the slight flinch Desmond made. “There is a way to find the answer you seek.”

“What are you going to do?” Desmond asked.

“Find the woman,” Malik said. “Kill her. When the deed is done, perhaps I’ll understand why I feel compelled to do so.” He took a step toward the doorway but the scuffle of body parts moving and the quick tug of Desmond’s hands on his arm stalled him before he reached it. 

“No,” Desmond said when they were facing one another. 

Malik shoved him back. “You are not allowed speak to me in that manner.” He followed after Desmond’s stumbling footsteps and pinned him against the wall. The rich-red-anger that had been a low ache in the bottom of his gut was broiling up into his chest now. It felt like a fire on his skin in a way that was largely absent from his acts of violence. Anger-clouded-reason and Malik did not strike out without reason.

“I’m allowed to do whatever I want,” Desmond snapped back. His own anger was an unimpressive red blush on his cheeks. “You don’t _own_ me just because you think you do! I gave you what you wanted; you owe me an answer!”

Malik hit him across the face with the open face of his palm and enjoyed the choked noise of shock that Desmond made. In the next instance, Altair was there with one hand pulling his shirt up-up out of the way and driving a knife into his back. That draining sensation of falling-falling-falling (but never landing) dragged him down into blackness.

\--

Awareness returned by short degrees, the burn of fire to his right. The humming sound of electricity as a persistent tickle in his ear. There was the mangle of voices drifting from somewhere over his head that paled in comparison to the steady sound of Altair’s breath. 

“Open your eyes,” Altair said (in Arabic, the first language they ever shared). “You may fool them but you do not fool me.” His fingers slapped across Malik’s cheek without any force. His thumb dragged at Malik’s lower lip but moved away before he could get his teeth on Altair’s broad fingers. “If you hurt the boy again I will not be so forgiving. A deal was made and you will honor it.”

The horrified little Assassins were across the room with weapons in their hands and uncertain revenge in their faces. It was only Desmond, sitting with his back against the doorframe, long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles; that looked unaffected by the whole thing. He was as he had been before: a persistently mutating entity. The minute shifts in his body language and his voice seemed to be subconscious but the intentional manipulation required more forethought that Malik would like to believe Desmond capable of. 

“My deal was with the boy,” Malik said.

Altair gripped his jaw, leaned down low enough their faces were all but brushing together. “You will honor the deal you have made, Malik.”

Desmond was looking at him, just looking at him, waiting up for what he had earned.

“What was your question?” Malik asked.

“Why do you have to kill Altair’s wife and children?” 

“Yes,” Malik said to himself. He put his hands behind his head and bent his knees. Altair was close to his left side: physically near enough to feel the warmth of him and the comforting brush of their reemerging soul. “This may take some time.” He closed his eyes as Altair put a hand across his chest. 

“I’ll wait,” Desmond said softly.

\--

There was an art to remembering: to picking out the bits of things that made the most sense and building them all together as a ladder to a memory much farther away. Malik’s mind was filled to bursting with thousands of years of thoughts-and-actions. Altair’s intervention in his life and the resulting bouts of violence hardly required a moment of concentration to recall.

So Malik lined them up from end-to-beginning, every single one of the women he had killed. The faces of those pitiful, ignorant women that had believed Altair was _capable_ of loving them. He could recall the sound of their cries, the spit-soaked please for their lives and the ultimate silence of their deaths. He could trace the short-lives of the children from birth to death. He could remember their names, and their lives in such clear details. He remembered their deaths—always quick, rarely more painful than necessary. Back-and-back-and-back he followed the blood trail to its start.

Yes, Malik remembered Sef. He remembered the boy that had been born with his father’s face and his mother’s color. The boy who had been left behind: tall and strong and proud in all the same ways that his father thought himself to be. Malik had never hated Sef. They had spent long-long hours together in the dusty library of Masyaf and out in the fields when Malik grew tired of being trapped inside.

Sef had-been-clever (more clever by far than his dim-witted brother). Sef-had-figured-it-out in the late afternoons and the early mornings. His voice, so small in Malik’s memory (the voice of a child) had been unwavering in strength when he said, “it’s you, isn’t it? You’re the one that betrayed us.”

Malik had not been angry-or-frightened when he nodded his head. In the low light of the late day, his robe did a poor job of concealing the mostly regrown length of his arm. And when he bared it for Sef’s inspection, the boy had not been offended or repulsed. There had only been the happy realization that he was _right_. “Who have you told?” Malik asked.

“Nobody,” Sef told him. So they went on like that, for days-and-weeks-and-months. Sef questioned him again and again about the way things-had-been and what things-like-Malik were capable of doing. He had once or twice assisted in the task of removing Malik’s arm from his body and been horrified-and-delighted when Malik compelled his severed arm to bend before the connection was lost.

The boy was a man, of course, a well-liked sort of man with a dozen pretty women that would have gladly made a life with him. He was a smarter man than his father but a poorer Assassin. His skills were adequate to spare his life but they were not enough to earn him respect-and-praise. Sef was already bleeding when he came to Malik (that final night). 

“There are men to attend this for you,” Malik said. But he cleaned the wound on Sef’s chest and did his best to bandage it. It was sloppy work (at best). When he looked up at Sef he expected the boy to tell him some spectacularly stupid story about how he’d managed to cut himself and how he could not bear to tell the other mortals.

He did not expect Sef to kiss him. He did not expect the boy to pull him so eagerly against his own half-bared body with such enthusiasm and open hunger. Malik had never seen the point in denying his own carnal impulses. Sef initiated the contact and moaned happily when Malik’s arm went around his back and pulled him even closer. It was so-very-easy. Sef clung to him with a red-open-mouth and scratched at his shoulders, eyes-wide-open as he watched the wounds heal. 

In the morning, Sef kissed him again and slipped away to fall in with his fellow Assassins. Malik wallowed in the stink of a well-used bed. He had no intention of killing Sef, felt no ill toward him and stood to gain nothing by killing the boy. 

It came to him by degrees, the barest sensation of something worming about in his gut—black-and-unknown—that nagged at him during the day and robbed him of calm. The excited loudness of the idiot Assassins all around him (Altair’s beloved little children, each-and-everyone). Then it was a stabbing sensation in his chest where the heart he’d happily taken from Altair seemed to seize up. For the briefest moment he thought he could feel-something-moving and then it was gone.

Sef was easy to find in the evening, far from the other Assassins, out by himself practicing the skills he could not master. Malik stopped for a moment to watch him and still felt no desire to kill the boy. Sef looked at him with such a smile on his face and came to greet him. “What troubles you?” the boy asked.

There it was again, that phantom sensation of being two-but-only-one. Somewhere, very far away from him, Altair had turned his head away from a battle toward a sound that had not been made. Malik turned his face toward that same sound and a spike of ( _despair_ ) coiled into a growl that grated through his throat. But it was gone-again-in a second, ripping away from him and in its place there was only blank-nothing. 

Malik was not even aware he had stabbed Sef until the boy’s hands were on his wrist and his voice was gasping weak-and-wounded. When Malik’s vision cleared and his body snapped back into this one-space-again, he looked at the dagger he had buried in the boy’s fragile side. There was no saving his life (anymore) but there were far kinder ways to die. Malik looked at his shock-white-face and the desperate betrayal in his face. He slid the knife free and turned the boy around, grabbed him by the chin to pull his head back and pressed a kiss against his cheek when he sliced his throat from ear to ear.

The pain that came was _exquisite_ sharper and more _real_ than any pain Malik could remember experiencing. It came from somewhere within him and sent electric-little-shocks here-and-there until his limbs were trembling. His vision dulled until everything was gray-and-black, moving in mutated shadows. 

If only for one brief second (forgotten nearly as soon as it happened) he thought Altair was right-next-to-him, thought he could feel a destructive fear and the useless, helpless clench of fingers against his own. 

Sef’s death gave way (as it often did) and Malik had to follow along that brief-little-moment, through the infinity of moments back-and-back to the time before the water. It was farther back than he had ever gone, farther back than he thought himself capable of remembering. 

It was black in his oldest memory; utter darkness as the sun blinked out of the sky. His body was stronger-then. His arms were heavy on his left side and Altair’s heart was strong pounding in place next to his. They were two-as-one, with an easy tumble of thoughts and acts that were seamless, all at once different and the same. In this distant memory, there was the heavy smell of blood and the angry crack of thunder that seemed to batter against the ground. Lightning spilt the sky in flashes so bright they were blinding. A great battle had laid waste to a land that had once been filled with beauty.

It started as a misstep, and then a tumble. Altair was cursing and Malik stilled their body, crouched them around the side of a broken statue and let go of the sword he’d been carrying to clutch at their chest where the burn-was-the-worst. 

There was fear—wild and hopeless—and Altair’s strong hand grabbing at his. The desperate drawl of his voice caught in the final moments of confusion. Malik turned his head, pressed a last kiss against Altair (the man he had no reason to think he’d ever see again). The pain was a terrible rend in his chest, as hot as fire, sharp enough to rip at the interlace of their ribs. Malik’s voice was steady (strong) when he said, “they cannot take you from me.” 

He sang to Altair, in those final seconds of awareness, sang to him of their victory over the tyrants and the peace they had sworn they would bring. But he knew (as even Altair must have known) that their victory had not come. The surviving Gods had banded together in one last desperate measure to destroy their own creations. Altair was quiet against him, not shaking or afraid. Malik was certain they would die, and he was content to go so long as Altair was with him.

Then he woke up in the sea—alone.


	19. Chapter 19

Desmond knew exactly-what-he’d hoped to gain from demanding an answer to the question Altair had asked. Those boxes back-at-the-vault were long pages of sour history, filled with blood and death and persistent vengeance spaced out by periods of utter silence. Desmond had spent long hours in the room with a monster who wasn’t capable of realizing how unspeakably vulnerable the recollections of its own long-denied guilt truly were. Malik had not been something _human_ for him but he’d had the aspiration of reaching such a point and his face had changed now-and-again when he touched on something painful in his own memory. 

The only chance Desmond had at freedom was to push Malik back into his soul. Altair was an uncertain ally in that goal. (Altair who wanted his own soul but cared so little for the lives Malik would destroy to find it again.) That was the choice he’d made (what felt like) hours ago in the privacy of his own little room. He could risk physical pain (or _death_ ) for the chance at freedom.

His goal was unashamedly selfish. His means were the same means that Malik had used against him for his own selfish gain. The element of vengeance at forcing Malik into something _painful_ and _unwanted_ was a precious little spark of joy in his chest. 

Maybe, Desmond expected Malik to think it over. Maybe, he expected him to take his sweet-sweet time to work it through. Maybe, he thought Malik would return to him with his sardonic monster’s-smile and tell him how once-upon-a-time a thing that looked very much like Malik had done something very wrong and the echo of guilt was a trigger to his soul. Maybe, Desmond thought Malik wouldn’t _care_ the way he had been persistently incapable of _caring_. Or maybe, he thought Malik would fracture in some way and the broken parts would fit against the broken parts of Altair and they would whole again. 

Desmond did not think (could not have thought) he would be left sitting in the large-arm-chair watching Malik covered with terrible-sweat as his body caught a shiver it could not absolve. He did not expect to watch Altair’s body bow with the weight of the unknown things Malik must have been remembering. He did not expect the hours, the passage of almost a whole day. He did not expect the explosion of sound in the early-early-morning (just before dawn) when Malik’s back arched off the floor and a scream wrenching out of his throat that was sound of absolute-despair. 

Maybe, Desmond expected to enjoy it.

\--

Altair had fought Malik for years. It was the first thing he could remember without the effort of concentrating. That moment when he saw the man for the first time and knew-without-a-doubt this was the very man his captors-and-trainers had conditioned him to hate-and-kill. But it wasn’t that conditioning that sparked the vengeful fury that fueled his attempt to kill Malik. Just as it was not Malik’s words falling like empty promises that Altair-had-been-lied to that stalled his blade. The unknown things, felt-but-not understood, had always driven him toward and away from Malik.

He hated the man with blood on his shaking hands and voice weak with fear crying about how his soul was slip-sliding out of his grasp. He hated the man with a blank expression and the body of his dead wife going cold in a careless, humiliating sprawl. He hated him for his complacency, the ease with which he allowed himself to be caught and held by the mortals. He hated the superior tilt of his head and the arrogance in his voice. He hated the methodical forethought that ruled Malik’s every-action. He hated the deliberate nature of his violence and the plain-spoken truth that was brittle and sharp. 

There was no part of Altair that had loved Malik enough to forgive him for the unknown crime he had committed. So they fought, the battle they waged against one another had started-and-ended wars that destroyed and reformed the lines of human allegiance. Time-and-time again, until the damage they had dealt culminated in the same-three-actions: Altair took a wife, Malik killed his wife, and Altair killed Malik.

But the years were long, and the dullness of being was unbearable. Altair-remembered-his-soul every waking moment of every day. He remembered the sensation of happiness and fear and anger and embarrassment. He remembered the weight of right-and-wrong when it dragged him down to the earth and removed the sense of divine _right_ to do as he pleased. Altair remembered _loving_ Malik and how powerful that delicate-little-fire left him feeling. All the days of his life that were spent in absence of that sensation were cold and blank.

First, he called it ‘need’ and he resented Malik for it. Then it called it ‘weakness’ and he hated himself for it. But it had been many-long-years since he’d last been this close to Malik. Years-and-years to walk the world without fear of the man finding him. 

It was Lena, (uncomfortably pregnant), who said, “how can you love someone so much it hurts? I haven’t even seen our baby, I haven’t touched him or looked at him. He doesn’t even have a name yet. I love him, I can’t stand it.” Her smile was soft-petal-pink and her hand was warm against his cheek. “You know?”

Altair-had-nodded (of course he had) and he had kissed her with his hand cupped around the curve of her belly as their son moved inside of her. He did not think of this child (poor little boy that would hardly live a life) or of Lena’s soft little sighs. He thought of the feeling he could not forget and the lingering desire to have it. “Yes,” he said long after Lena had moved onto another thought, “I understand what you mean.”

Here, right _now_ , with Malik’s body shivering-shivering against the floor and the dampness of his sweat soaking through the clothes he wore, Altair hated Malik more than he’d ever hated him before. It deformed the shape of their soul—such a timid and half-realized thing still—and it made it hard to grasp it and hold it fast. Altair laid his body against Malik’s, pushed his hand against the blackened mark of the eagle that stretched the width of Malik’s chest.

With his eyes closed he could feel the muted echoing _emotions_ that were strongest and brightest in Malik’s mind. He did not try to touch them or to hold them. He did not attempt to follow them along to grasp at the memory of things they had both forgotten. For many hours, he simply lay and shared the sensation of (the ability to feel any) emotion. 

When the blackness came in Malik’s memory, it dragged them both under. Wet-and-crushing (like the water, the eternity of hellish pressure and dark) it pulled him back into the time they had forgotten. Malik-felt-anger-and-guilt but Altair was _afraid_ (terrible, paralyzing fear). This was not his memory, but the final joint memory of their battered little soul. 

It was Malik who had decided they would no longer be slaves for the Gods (that Altair remembered now. How Malik had simply refused to be treated as an animal any longer). It was Malik who had planned the invasion. It was Malik who had figured out how to kill the Gods-themselves. But it wasn’t, it could not have been. In those days they were one-and-the-same, two minds and two hearts and one whole being. 

When it failed, Malik had pulled from him. Malik had taken the failure much the same way he was often fond of plucking food from Altair’s hand and eating it for himself. There was no mirth in his soul when Malik tore the guilt-of-failure from Altair. Without it, without the knowledge of intent (the many long months of preparation), there was confusion, fear and blame in its place. The Gods were tearing them apart—unevenly—and every man-and-woman around them was screaming-screaming-screaming. Every one of them save for Malik with lips against the side of Altair’s bent head and his voice (strong and proud) singing-to-him of _paradise_ and _victory_. 

It was Malik’s scream that pulled him out of the memory, that dragged him into the present: a floor by a fire with a host of dreary, half-asleep mortals shocked into sudden alertness by the sound. Altair was blinking tears out of his eyes, rolling against Malik’s violently arched body to push him flat and cover him with the protection he had not been able to offer before. 

“You idiot,” Altair said, “you stupid, selfish idiot.” 

Malik’s hands were clawing at his back, trying-and-failing to find something to grip onto as tears welled into his eyes and his raw throat made bleak little sounds that were neither words nor cries of pain. 

Their soul: shrunken, wounded and malformed, was all at once _there_ with startling intensity. 

\--

A day passed between the moment Malik woke up on the floor by the fire and the moment when Desmond came out on the porch to find him. The curious difference in the boy between two-days-ago (beaten and subservient) and now (beaten and defiant) was made remarkable only by the odd sympathetic patience Desmond had employed against him. The answer that Malik still owed Desmond was rightfully his and therefore could have been rightfully demanded in the immediate-messy-aftermath. 

Even the Assassins, overcome with confusion, had not made an attempt to question him. Malik attributed their distance to Altair who stood like a solemn guardian in the doorway of any room Malik was occupying. There was no delight to know the two of them incited fear-not-respect in the strange collection of humans that surrounded them. But it was useful enough.

Malik was outside (always outside, always where there were no walls to cage him) in the snowy cold. For the sake of the humans that were caught in mortal concerns, he had bothered to put on a coat, a scarf, a hat, a pair of gloves and shoes. Altair had dressed himself but stillness seemed to aggravate the unfinished thoughts knocking around his head and he had started to climb a tree hours before and not returned yet. 

Desmond sat in the empty seat next to him with a cup of steaming-hot-coffee. His body reclined with greater ease than it had in days prior. He drew in the chill of the air and let it out again. “What happens now?” he said.

“Did you want an answer to your question?” Malik asked. He turned away from watching the sun glaring off the snow and listening to the illusion of stillness the snow brought. “I believe one is still owed to you.”

But Desmond shook his head. “I just need to know what happens next. I need to know if you’re going to show up in twenty years and kill my children—if I have any.” A half-breath of pause before Desmond shifted in the chair. “I need to know if you…care about any of it. If you’re sorry about it.”

“The answer to that question will not bring you any peace,” Malik said. He turned in the swing he was sitting on so that his feet were on the floor. The whole world around him felt different when his soul came back to him. The way he thought shifted into something weighted more heavily in morally right and morally wrong (rather than most likely to garner appropriate results). He knew, of course, that Desmond wanted him to admit guilt, to admit he was capable of feeling it and that he did feel it for the things he’d done without his soul. Malik could have lied to him, he could have faked the emotion that he did not feel for Desmond’s benefit (surely he owed it to him) but there was no kindness in lying. 

“Why?” Desmond said.

“I don’t know,” Malik said. “But I imagine it is because I have conditioned myself not to feel guilt. Could you imagine how crippling that would be, were I to allow myself to feel it? What you experienced was gentle and loving in comparison to the many atrocities I have committed. It is a poor excuse. I cannot offer you an apology when it is insincere, but I do offer you the chance at physical retribution if it would help in any way.”

“Right,” Desmond said with a huff of wet breath. “I’ll just strangle you a few times while you sit patiently and maybe if Altair is distracted by a cat or something I’ll fuck you even though I know you don’t want it.”

“Altair would not interfere if he felt it was just,” Malik said gently.

“I don’t fucking want _physical retribution_ ,” Desmond said. The words were wet-and-growled as he stood up. “I want something to make sense! I want to know that all of this shit that just happened _changed_ something. Look at you! You’re exactly the same as you were before. You don’t care at all. I let you—” but his voice broke and his breath was heavy in through his nose and out again. “Make a deal that you will not harm my children, Malik. That is what I want. Nobody else in my bloodline suffers, nobody else dies because of you.”

Malik nodded.

Desmond threw his coffee out into the snow and turned away from him to go back to the house. His hand was on the cold metal of the screen door when Malik said, “I did not pick you because you look like him. I chose you because you look very much like his son, Sef. Who, I suppose, looked very much like Altair. I mortally wounded Sef in a moment of distraction and I killed him to spare him the slow death a gut wound would have brought in those days. It will perhaps be a very small comfort for you to know that while I do not yet feel guilt for what I did to you, I do regret what I did to him.”

“Did you toy with him for your own amusement too?” Desmond asked without looking at him.

“No,” Malik said. “Sef fell in love with me. I felt the same apathy toward him that I felt toward you.”

“Great,” Desmond said. Then he went into the house and slammed the door after himself.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the epilogue, folks.

Epilogue

The morning started the same as the day before: a shock of sudden awareness that rocked him out of sleep as surely as if he’d been slapped. The wound on his side (an unfortunate mishap while taking out a particularly vile Templar who had taken to brainwashing grade schoolers) was a fresh sting of pain when the stitches pulled. His sudden movement strained the already bruised flesh and he collapsed back into the luxurious softness of the bed with a whine of defeat. The safe house they were occupying was an embarrassment of excessive luxury—the sort of thing that Shaun had lectured them would garner too much attention and slow them down in the long run. Back when they were sleeping on mats on the floor and living in dank basements, Shaun was loud-and-constant with the stream of reasons they couldn’t rent a penthouse and assassinate in style. But work, and necessity, had driven them back to the Farm and the many contradictions it offered.

Comfortable beds, for instance, but no (obvious) electricity. (Shaun had been _furious_ about that at first before he found the single building that did have power and internet and all the many wonderful things Shaun relied on.)

The old clock on the blocky bedside table said it was seven-oh-two in the morning. Desmond rubbed at his eyes and rolled onto his good side and up onto his feet. His shirt was bunched up around his ribs in such a way that the mirror caught the mauled looking flesh of his side. The wound was longer than his hand and curved at the edges where the bastard had tried to tear the entire chunk of flesh off. There was no sign of infection yet. It was a small and merciful miracle considering the days on the road with nothing but torn pieces of his shirt to bind the wound to get him here. 

The cold was sneaking in through the panes of glass in the windows, filling the whole of the room with the late-winter chill. The fire was red-glowing-embers that provided little heat anywhere beyond the immediate hearth. He left it to extinguish itself and pulled his gloves, coat and shoes on before he pulled the door open and stepped out into the white-chill. The mess hall (so called) was across the main thoroughfare, tucked between a few trees that seemed to have grown to immense heights since Desmond ran away from this place at sixteen. There was a curl of smoke rising from the chimney and the delicious-heated smell of melting butter, fresh black coffee and crispy bacon. 

Desmond was reaching for the door when it banged open and a pretty-faced woman paused mid-life to apologize for nearly hitting him. Her name was Anna, she was a recent transfer from Europe (orphaned, as many Assassins were) in attempt to protect her from the Templars that had set to kill all of her family. Her smile was dazzling (knee-weakening, even) when she said, “I heard it was your birthday.”

“Oh, yeah,” Desmond said. “I’m—” It was fucking embarrassing how he couldn’t remember what year it was about half of the time. After a while it all blended together into one long seamless loss of time. He tapped his fingers against his thumb as he worked it out and her smile twisted into something a little less polite and a little more amused-at-his-embarrassing ignorance. “Thirty two,” he said finally.

“An old man to be sure,” Anna said. 

Desmond nodded. “I hope to get a few years old, yet.”

Anna smiled at him sweetly and then ducked out of his way. Desmond stepped into the mess hall to a call of congratulations at surviving another year. Rebecca dropped a plate of pancakes and bacon in front of him and poured enough syrup on top to poison him. “Happy birthday,” she said. 

\--

The rest of the day passed the same. Desmond was forbidden from any strenuous physical activity (according to Shaun, this meant anything other than sitting quietly and walking slowly). The majority of the people that populated the Farm were strangers to him, but there was one or two of the older men that remembered Desmond-as-a-child. Almost everyone (Anna excluded) remembered William. They revered him as some kind of modern-day-Mentor; in their minds no less important or impressive than Ezio-Auditore-Da-Firenze himself. (Although, thankfully, one-hundred-percent less likely to have accidentally fucked Malik.) 

In short, there were far too many people happy to help Shaun keep him from doing anything. He managed a few hours in the library that William and his predecessors had put together. He sat on the hard wooden chair and read his way through a few hundred years’ worth of abbreviated history (none of which included immortals or soul mates). 

He snuck lunch out of the mess hall before he could get cornered by well-meaning well-wishers and went back to his sole little room to build his fire back up into something capable of warming the tiny little apartment. When it was warm again, he fell asleep (for lack of anything better to do). 

\--

It was already get dark out when Desmond woke up again. He pulled an extra shirt on to fight off the chill of sunset. (Loss of blood, Shaun told him, it made the cold more extreme.) Then his coat and his shoes and went to find food. The yard where the young (or new) Assassins trained was already abandoned but the ruts in the snow showed where they had been practicing. Desmond stumbled to a pause in the middle of the main road, looked at the mess hall and then back at the dark little building where they housed the electricity. Shaun had disappeared inside of it days ago and was hardly seen since. Desmond didn’t miss him (exactly) but the man was one of his only two friends in the whole compound. 

His stomach groaned in objection when he went toward Shaun and farther away from the food. The snow was thickest where people rarely walked and Desmond’s pants were crusted with it by the time he reached the flat little porch and the dirty mat for wiping his feet. He opened the door to find Shaun (alone) in the center of a dozen computer screens with his sweater rolled up to his elbows and his face caught in a look of the most aghast disappointment in humanity ever. The red weal of a scar he’d gotten from a close call in Copenhagen was bright red against his pale skin. (It adds character, Shaun had said in the aftermath. My face was always a bit too bland before.) 

“Am I interrupting?” Desmond asked.

“Yes, God, please interrupt,” Shaun said. He shook his head as if he were trying to disengage from the screens. Then he looked down at his watch and seemed surprised about what he found. “It’s your birthday. How does getting older feel?”

Desmond snorted. “I’m cold, hungry, wounded and my best friend is hiding from me. So pretty much the same as yesterday.” He sat down in the plush office chair and put his feet up on the grimy plastic crate. “Any news about new targets?”

“Do you mean in general or have I sufficiently removed enough of my own brain cells to consider allowing you to return to the field?” Shaun leaned back into his own chair, stretched his arms out over his body and roared a yawn. 

“Yeah, yeah. How about our friends, have they resurfaced?” Desmond said. He picked up a printout of some building and the extraneous information about employees and security features. Shaun leaned forward to pull it out of his lax grip and set it where he couldn’t get to it. 

“As I said last week, there has been no activity on that front. And as we have also discussed, the dormant period is often measured in decades not years. I will continue to check to assuage your paranoia but I really think you should let it go.” Even as he said it, he seemed to be aware that it was a stupid attempt. 

Desmond did not even bother to answer. “I’m pretty sure they’re going to sing happy birthday to me at dinner. Want to come watch?” 

“I do love watching you get embarrassed. Will there be a pretty young woman there to kiss you and make you turn colors?” Shaun asked. He was already standing up, tugging at his sweater sleeves and pulling them straight down. His coat was a ridiculous overstuffed black monstrosity with fluffy gray fur around the hood. “Shall we?”

They arrived at the mess hall in time to be serenaded by a merry crew of Assassins before Rebecca toasted him for his skill at gathering injuries and had the whole room laughing at him. There were no pretty girls to kiss him (shame that) but it was a nice enough gathering.

\--

It was a week-or-so-later, when Desmond had finally convinced some of the younger members of the Farm that he could spar safely with them, when Anna showed up on the practice field. She wasn’t brand-new but she was still new enough she hadn’t earned the hidden blade. 

“Hey,” she said when she ran up to him on the practice field. 

“Hey,” he said back. Most of his fellow Assassins concentrated on stealth, speed, and hand-to-hand combat. Many of them still practiced with the hidden blade (some of them regarded it as merely ceremonial in nature) but very, very few of them bothered to ever pick up a sword. Guns were very much in style (much more logical as well). But Desmond had seen the efficient damage a sword could do in a pinch and there was something far more primal to learning to use one than achieving optimal aim with an impersonal gun. 

“I asked around,” Anna said, “everyone says you’re the one to teach me how to use a blade.” She nodded at the sword he was holding and held up her own short dagger. “I’m not that strong yet, but I thought I should have some kind of skill to protect myself while I worked on that.”

Yeah, Desmond understood the impulse to protect oneself. He nodded, “yeah I can show you.”

“Thanks.” And there was the bright-bright-smile again.

\--

It was not necessity that drove Desmond back to the Farm year-after-year. He had gathered enough allies in foreign countries to find sanctuary just about anywhere in the world. Shaun-and-Rebecca (and their infrequent additions) were clever enough to find-safe-houses wherever they went. 

Desmond went back to Anna, year-after-year as she improved from a clumsy novice to a competent journeyman to a cautious master. She invited herself to join his team in almost exactly the same way she proposed marriage to herself on his behalf. 

“So I’m joining your team,” she said. “So I’m marrying you,” she said. They made a life out of it, running around and saving the world by killing one evil man at a time. It wasn’t a glorious life but it was more-than-enough to know they were not just the victims of their past but active agents of their future. Anna did not often talk about how her family had been murdered and Desmond never talked about what happened to him.

\--

So it went, until Anna turned twenty-seven (Desmond was a rather fit and still living thirty nine) and decided she wanted to have a kid before repeated injury (or death) prevented it. They found themselves back on the Farm out of habit with a familiar host of faces to wish them the best. Desmond was forced into the role of instructor (an active Assassin still living at thirty nine!) and Anna fell easily into place gathering information for missions. 

Shaun stayed but Rebecca could not be contained. 

Long after Anna was safely in bed, far from the computers and the words Desmond had never asked around her, he said, “what about our friends, Shaun?”

Shaun said, “nothing.”

\--

Desmond was a father at forty one—a miracle that he would not have thought possible at twenty five. The child was a boy who looked far more like his mother than him (thank God for that). They played at being a family for a while, happy enough to raise their son without the expectation that he follow in their footsteps. 

Every night he found Shaun and said, “what about our friends?”

Every night, Shaun shook his head and sent him on his way.

At forty three, he had a daughter. The world that had once seemed too damn big had narrowed into a short scope of raising his children to survive in the hostile reality of a war that was never going to cease. The bitter knowledge of its true start left a sour taste in his mouth and while he raged against the notion of training his son to be an Assassin, he could not bring himself to tell Anna why he would have preferred any future for their children but the one they had made for themselves.

\--

Desmond was fifty-one (an old man, Pop, as his son said) with a persistent ache in his left knee and an annoying tendency to talk in a way far too similar to his own father. His son—ten years old and strong as an ox—was both smarter and more tolerant than Desmond could ever remember himself being. His daughter seemed like she was destined to grow up the hardest possible way, fighting all the way for her own freedom.

Shaun-had-gone, in the intervening years, and Anna had taken over the research of new targets. Desmond had made a deal with himself never-ever to mention Malik to anyone that hadn’t met the monster for themselves. But he kept his eye on the calendar than hung on the wall because it had been longer-than-years, bridging into decades and Malik should have been running out of traction to hang on to his soul. 

\--

It was his daughter—pigheaded and stubborn—that ran away at thirteen. Desmond discovered her missing and spent a good ten minutes in her empty room looking at the evidence of her carefully laid plan. He contemplated covering her departure until it was simply too late to find her out in the world. It was spring now, warm enough to travel a good distance without worrying about exposure, and she had taken everything she’d need to make it somewhere she thought she needed to go. But obligation drove him out of her abandoned little room and to the shack where his wife worked. 

It was her voice that drove the novices out to search for their missing daughter. By nightfall every available man was searching the surrounding woods and towns for her.

Anna did not sleep for days. She screamed and cried and raged and shouted abuse at Desmond (for his apathy at their child’s sudden departure) before she collapsed at the end of three days. The novices came back empty-handed and everyone assumed that the girl had either escaped or had been taken. Anna assumed both, simultaneously, and the contradiction offered her no peace.

\--

Desmond was fifty six, weighted down by a mixture of pride-and-worry, when the monster came back to him. Malik appeared one day without so much as a single person sighting him as he infiltrated the compound. Malik let himself into his daughter’s room and was sitting on a chair by the tiny fireplace at the head of the room. He looked perfectly out of place there with a collection of little-girl things stacked onto the few shelves all around him. Unicorns to the left of his head and preteen romance novels on the right. There was a sword balanced across his knees as he sat perfectly still, legs crossed, and looked at the bed. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” Desmond snapped before he could help it. (All these years, all those long-long-years he thought that wouldn’t be so rash. He thought he’d convince himself not to feel a thing. 

“Shhh,” Malik said softly. He had not changed at all, not-even-a-little. He was dressed in all black. His hair was still short and thick, going this-way and that-way on his head. His eyes were dark in the dim morning light from the windows. He pointed one hand across the room to the bed. 

Desmond looked, saw his daughter’s dark-dark-hair spread across the pillow she’d abandoned and the rise-fall of her chest as she breathed deep and slow in her sleep. A pitiful twist of something awful brought tears to his eyes and weakness to his knees. “Oh God,” he gasped.

Malik stood up, crossed the room on silent-feet and pulled him by the arm toward the door. “Come,” he said. He pulled softly at first and then harder when Desmond tried to get to his daughter. The insistence broke something like fury that had Desmond slapping at Malik’s hands even as he was pulled out of the room. It was muddy out from the rain that came frequently this time of year. 

“Get off me,” Desmond snarled.

Malik released him, held the sword in a loose hand at his side and took a step back. 

“Why are you here?” Desmond demanded. He couldn’t see-anything, couldn’t-feel-anything, couldn’t-understand anything but the unresolved anger-and-hurt of a twenty five year old idiot. “Tell me!”

“Your wife is coming,” Malik said. He moved his hand so the sword was hidden from obvious view by his body. “You’ve been so careful about not telling her. I’d happily play along with whatever lie you tell her about me.”

Desmond hit him and Malik let it happen. There was no sense in believing that he—at fifty six, old and weathered and hardly the specimen he’d once been—had surprised the monster. He hit Malik and knocked him back against the side of the building, knocked his head into the wood and bloodied his lip for one brief moment. 

“Desmond!” Anna shouted.

There was Altair, falling from the sky (or so it seemed) into a low crouch just to his right. There he was, the same as he’d been thirty one years ago, pulling Desmond away from Malik and putting his body between them. “We’ve been very careful,” Altair said, “to avoid violence. We are not here to cause problems. We would not have stayed this long except the girl refused to be left alone and Malik promised he would not leave until she was ready.”

“What?” Desmond demanded. Anna said ‘what’ but she was ducking into the room with a gasp of shock and then shrieking with joy when she found their child. Her voice was twisted up in joy-and-hurt when she said ‘what happened baby, what happened?’

“She made it a good distance,” Malik said. “Not as far as you must have travelled to get free but far enough you might have been proud. She was captured by a man that thought you would trade your own freedom for hers. Altair,” Malik motioned to him, “managed to change his mind.”

“I thought you were avoiding violence,” Desmond said.

“Malik is,” was all Altair said.

“What did you tell her?” Desmond asked.

“I told her that I was an Assassin and that you had sent me to save her.” Then Malik straightened away from the wall. “I made you a promise. While her death would not have ultimately been at my hands, not intervening would have been very close to the same as killing her myself.”

“You’ve been watching me?” Desmond said.

Altair let out a little noise. Malik, though, even with humanity wrapped around him like a fragile shell, only nodded. “I have not interfered with your life, and I have not always been so close to you as we have been in the years since your children were born.”

“We’re going,” Altair said. He put a hand on Malik and pulled him gently toward the exit. “The girl is fine, we need to go.”

Malik followed after he sheathed his sword and pulled the hood of his jacket over his head. Altair-still-swayed when he moved and Malik-still-stalked. They were six-or-seven steps away when Desmond said, “has it changed?”

Any other man would have played at ignorance. They might have forgotten the conversation that happened half-a-lifetime ago. Maybe even Malik could have forgotten the idiot-little-boy who had yelled at him about the apology he didn’t even want. Except that he hadn’t, Malik turned back to look at him. “No, I do not feel sorry for what happened. But _something_ has changed.”

It wasn’t a comfort, but the wound was old now and Desmond had long-since grown used to the feeling of it. He looked back at the open door of his daughter’s room and the sound of her voice caught in fear and hurt as she told what had happened. “You’ll protect them,” Desmond said.

“I will,” Malik said, “my word is good regardless of the state of my soul. Your children and their children will be as safe as possible.”

Desmond nodded. “Good luck,” he said.

“You as well,” Malik said. He turned to walk but Altair paused a moment before he said, “thank you, Desmond.” Then he was gone too, racing across the ground to get enough speed to scale the wall that surrounded the compound. Malik was already at the top, poised over the pointed edge of it with an impatient look on his face. They disappeared from view only seconds before his wife came out of the room with their daughter carefully sheltered in her arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, thank you for reading!


End file.
